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.

The practice of the collective DIMASLA (Diana + Álvaro) is situated at a fertile intersection between contemporary art, ecological thinking, and a philosophy of experience that shifts the emphasis from production to attention. Faced with the visual and material acceleration of the present, their work does not propose a head-on opposition, but rather a sensitive reconciliation with time, understood as lived duration rather than as a measure. The work thus emerges as an exercise in slowing down, a pedagogy of perception where contemplating and listening become modes of knowledge.

In the work of DIMASLA (Diana + Álvaro), the territory does not function as a framework but rather as an agent. The landscape actively participates in the process, establishing a dialogical relationship reminiscent of certain eco-critical currents, in which subjectivity is decentralized and recognized as part of a broader framework. This openness implies an ethic of exposure, which is defined as the act of exposing oneself to the climate, the elements, and the unpredictable, and this means accepting vulnerability as an epistemological condition.

The materials—fabrics, pigments, and footprints—serve as surfaces for temporary inscriptions and memories, bearing the marks of time. The initial planning is conceived as an open hypothesis, allowing chance and error to act as productive forces. In this way, the artistic practice of DIMASLA (Diana + Álvaro) articulates a poetics of care and being-with, where creating is, above all, a profound way of feeling and understanding nature.

In a historical moment marked by speed and the overproduction of images, your work seems to champion slowness and listening as forms of resistance. Could it be said that your practice proposes a way of relearning time through aesthetic experience?

Diana: Yes, but more than resistance or vindication, I would speak of reconciliation—of love. It may appear slow, but it is deliberation; it is reflection. Filling time with contemplation or listening is a way of feeling. Aesthetic experience leads us along a path of reflection on what lies outside us and what lies within.

The territory does not appear in your work as a backdrop or a setting, but as an interlocutor. How do you negotiate that conversation between the artist’s will and the voice of the place, when the landscape itself participates in the creative process?

Álvaro: For us, the landscape is like a life partner or a close friend, and naturally this intimate relationship extends into our practice. We go to visit it, to be with it, to co-create together. We engage in a dialogue that goes beyond aesthetics—conversations filled with action, contemplation, understanding, and respect.

Ultimately, in a way, the landscape expresses itself through the material. We respect all the questions it poses, while at the same time valuing what unsettles us, what shapes us, and what stimulates us within this relationship.

The Conquest of the Rabbits I & II. 2021. Process.

In your approach, one senses an ethic of exposure: exposing oneself to the environment, to the weather, to others, to the unpredictable. To what extent is this vulnerability also a form of knowledge?

Diana: For us, this vulnerability teaches us a great deal—above all, humility. When we are out there and feel the cold, the rain, or the sun, we become aware of how small and insignificant we are in comparison to the grandeur and power of nature.

So yes, we understand vulnerability as a profound source of knowledge—one that helps us, among many other things, to let go of our ego and to understand that we are only a small part of a far more complex web.

Sometimes mountains cry too. 2021. Limestone rockfall, sun, rain, wind, pine resin on acrylic on natural cotton canvas, exposed on a blanket of esparto grass and limestone for two months.. 195 cm x 130 cm x 3 cm.

Your works often emerge from prolonged processes of exposure to the environment. Could it be said that the material—the fabrics, the pigments, the traces of the environment—acts as a memory that time writes on you as much as you write on it?

Álvaro: This is a topic for a long conversation, sitting on a rock—it would be very stimulating. But if experiences shape people’s inner lives and define who we are in the present moment, then I would say yes, especially in that sense.

Leaving our comfort zone has led us to learn from the perseverance of plants and the geological calm of mountains. Through this process, we have reconciled ourselves with time, with the environment, with nature, with ourselves, and even with our own practice. Just as fabrics hold the memory of a place, we have relearned how to pay attention and how to understand. Ultimately, it is a way of deepening our capacity to feel.

The fox and his tricks. 2022. Detail.

To what extent do you plan your work, and how much space do you leave for the unexpected—or even for mistakes?

Diana: Our planning is limited to an initial hypothesis. We choose the materials, colours, places, and sometimes even the specific location, but we leave as much room as possible for the unexpected to occur. In the end, that is what it is really about: allowing nature to speak and life to unfold. For us, both the unexpected and mistakes are part of the world’s complexity, and within that complexity we find a form of natural beauty.