Elena Gual

Elena Gual has a marked and recognizable technique inspired by the image of interracial women despite continuing to open new lines of work and even venturing into abstraction. Her work is characterized by the use of the palette knife and his knowledge of Renaissance painters and classical sculpture techniques.

All this, thanks to the three years of training at the art academy in Florence. Later she moved back to London, where she lived from the age of 16 to continue her training at the Royal College of Art and Central Saint Martins. She has exhibited in Monaco, Paris, Venice and London. Back in Spain, Arena Martínez Projects presents her work for the first time in her country at Estampa 2021 fair, on the occasion of the Art Madrid fair her work can be seen for the second time in Spain.

Elena Gual

Reflexión, 2021

Oil on canvas

40 x 40cm

Interview:

¿What inspires you to create?

I don’t think I have something special or a new perspective on the subject. In the end, it is mainly the colors, the emotions I feel on a daily basis, even my journeys are a source of inspiration. Throughout my career I have also started recognizing that inspiration is also a solution to a problem. Like Picasso said once, inspiration is found through work, and that is exactly what I do. When something does not quite come out as I expected, I start producing and evolving, until I find a goal that I’m satisfied with.

¿What have you been working on lately?

During the last 4 years I have centered my production on womanhood, trying to reach equality between us through my strokes on the canvas. Lately I’m centering myself a lot more on emotions, I think that is the reason why I am a lot less conceptual and more figurative these days. I am focused primarily on the subject of our bodies and equality.

Elena Gual

Niza, 2021

Óleo en tabla de madera

37 x 35cm

Tell us about your creative process.

When I studied in the Accademy of Florence, before sitting at the easel the process was: sketching, studying the composition and studying the light. It helped me a lot when it came to creating my own artwork. It makes me understand exactly what I want: from composition, to lighting, from start to finish.

Is this your first time at the fair? What do you expect Art Madrid?

Something that I really love about art fairs is having my paintings exposed to the public, having them to be present in the event knowing that many people will see them. I like to think that they will cause a wide range of emotions: some people will stop and stare at them, others will completely ignore them. But most importantly, they will be in the memory of many people.

In your realistic portraits you represent female figures of different ethnicities, ages and cultures. Are they women you meet on your travels, are they part of your life?

Most of the women I have painted have been part of my life in some way or another. I have known them in my journeys, I have co-lived with them many adventures. But I have to say that, now more than ever, I try to inspire myself in the connection I make with these women, in something more concrete, like a story that they choose to tell me, and from there I try to recreate an emotion.

Elena Gual participates in Art Madrid with Arena Martínez Projects, along together with Paspartus, Carlos Cartaxo, Juana González y Francisco Mendes.

Daniel Barrio. Guest artist of the third edition of OPEN BOOTH. Courtesy of the artist.

DESPIECE. PROTOCOLO DE MUTACIÓN

As part of the Art Madrid’26 Parallel Program, we present the third edition of Open Booth, a space conceived as a platform for artistic creation and contemporary experimentation. The initiative focuses on artists who do not yet have representation within the gallery circuit, offering a high-visibility professional context in which new voices can develop their practice, explore forms of engagement with audiences, and consolidate their presence within the current art scene. On this occasion, the project features artist Daniel Barrio (Cuba, 1988), who presents the site-specific work Despiece. Protocolo de mutación.

Daniel Barrio’s practice focuses on painting as a space for experimentation, from which he explores the commodification of social life and the tyranny of media approval. He works with images drawn from the press and other media, intervening in them pictorially to disrupt their original meaning. Through this process, the artist opens up new readings and questions how meaning is produced, approaching painting as a space of realization, therapy, and catharsis.

Despiece. Protocolo de mutación is built from urban remnants, industrial materials, and fragments of history, inviting us to reflect on which memories we inherit, which we consume, and which ones we are capable of creating. Floors, walls, and volumes come together to form a landscape under tension, where the sacred coexists with the everyday, and where cracks matter more than perfection.

The constant evolution of art calls for ongoing exchange between artists, institutions, and audiences. In its 21st edition, Art Madrid reaffirms its commitment to acting as a catalyst for this dialogue, expanding the traditional boundaries of the art fair context and opening up new possibilities of visibility for emerging practices.

Despiece. Protocolo de mutación emerges from a critical and affective impulse to dismantle, examine, and reassemble what shapes us culturally and personally. The work is conceived as an inseparable whole: an inner landscape that operates as a device of suspicion, where floors, walls, and volumes configure an ecosystem of remnants. It proposes a reading of history not as a linear continuity, but as a system of forces in permanent friction, articulating space as an altered archive—a surface that presents itself as definitive while remaining in constant transformation.

The work takes shape as a landscape constructed from urban waste, where floors, walls, and objects form a unified body made of lime mortar, PVC from theatrical signage, industrial foam, and offering wax. At the core of the project is an L-shaped structure measuring 5 × 3 meters, which reinterprets the fresco technique on reclaimed industrial supports. The mortar is applied wet over continuous working days, without a pursuit of perfection, allowing the material to reveal its own character. Orbiting this structure are architectural fragments: foam blocks that simulate concrete, a 3D-printed and distorted Belvedere torso, and a wax sculptural element embedded with sandpaper used by anonymous workers and artists, preserving the labor of those other bodies.

A white wax sculptural element functions within the installation as a point of sensory concentration that challenges the gaze. Inside it converge the accumulated faith of offering candles and the industrial residues of the studio, recalling that purity and devotion coexist with the materiality of everyday life. The viewer’s experience thus moves beyond the visual: bending down, smelling, and approaching its vulnerability transforms perception into an intimate, embodied act. Embedded within its density are sanding blocks used by artists, artisans, and laborers, recovered from other contexts, where the sandpaper operates as a trace of the effort of other bodies, following a protocol of registration with no autobiographical intent.

Despiece. Protocolo de mutación addresses us directly, asking: which memory do we value—the one we consume, or the one we construct with rigor? The audience leaves behind a purely contemplative position to become part of the system, as the effort of moving matter, documentary rigor, and immersive materiality form a body of resistance against a mediated reality. The project thus takes shape as an inner landscape, where floor, surface, and volume articulate an anatomy of residues. Adulteration operates as an analytical methodology applied to the layers of urban reality, intervening in history through theatrical and street advertising, architectural remnants, and administrative protocols, proposing that art can restore the capacity to build one’s own memory, even if inevitably fragmented.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

DANIEL BARRIO (1988, Cuba)

Daniel Barrio (Cienfuegos, Cuba, 1988) is a visual artist whose practice articulates space through painting, understanding the environment as an altered archive open to critical intervention. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of Cienfuegos (2004–2008), specializing in painting, and later at the Madrid Film School (ECAM, 2012–2015), where he studied Art Direction. His methodology integrates visual thinking with scenographic narrative.

His trajectory includes solo exhibitions such as La levedad en lo cotidiano (Galería María Porto, Madrid, 2023), Interiores ajenos (PlusArtis, Madrid, 2022), and Tribud (Navel Art, Madrid, 2019), as well as significant group exhibitions including Space is the Landscape (Estudio Show, Madrid, 2024), Winterlinch (Espacio Valverde Gallery, Madrid, 2024), Hiberia (Galería María Porto, Lisbon, 2023), and the traveling exhibition of the La Rioja Young Art Exhibition (2022).

A member of the Resiliencia Collective, his work does not pursue the production of objects but rather the articulation of pictorial devices that generate protocols of resistance against the flow of disposable images. In a context saturated with immediate data, his practice produces traces and archives what must endure, questioning not the meaning of the work itself but the memory the viewer constructs through interaction—thus reclaiming sovereignty over the gaze and inhabiting ruins as a method for understanding the present.