Within the online exhibition “Intimate spaces. Personal reflections” eight artists whose works are connected by the search of the intimate space live together. The images by Xurxo Gómez-Chao, Alfonso Zubiaga, Carlos Regueira, Soledad Córdoba, Rocío Verdejo, Andy Sotiriou, Ely Sánchez and José Quintanilla capture serene and solitary settings, empty spaces, open-plan rooms with which they invite personal reflection. The selection of images in this exhibition assembles around two areas: that of interior spaces and that of natural landscapes.

The individual is immersed in an everyday whirl leading him to a vital dilemma. A large part of our decisions is the fruit of the evolution of things, the imposition of standardised guidelines that surround us with routines of modernity, in the stream of the society of our time. However, the need to recover the essence of the human being is often imposed on this inertia. The return to spirituality, to inner balance, demands its place.

With the series "La Salita" the photographer Xurxo Gómez-Chao manages to give soul to walls and spaces in which the only outstanding element is an armchair. This way, he creates dreamlike environments within those interior landscapes where the absence of any other element confers a more intangible meaning.

Xurxo Gómez-Chao

Hotel Earle. Red room, 2016

Photography on paper Ilford

100 x 80cm

Xurxo Gómez-Chao

Hotel Earle. Golden room, 2016

Photography on paper Ilford

75 x 60cm

For her part, the lyrical scenarios of the series "Limbo" by Soledad Córdoba start from experienced and dreamy realities. Her images create visual poems, where silence, beauty, pain, fear or lack of communication are present and united by a fragile thread. Rocío Verdejo, likewise Soledad, introduces human figures in her compositions to unravel that tangle of feelings and emotions that gender violence implies. Her work "Crashroom" is a visual metaphor that manages to express the "not to exist inside".

Rocío Verdejo

Crashroom, 2014

Printing with pigmented inks on Hahnemühle paper on dibond

70 x 50cm

Natural environments also offer a multitude of possibilities to show those sensations even if there are no walls, no borders, no limitations. We find naked landscapes that manage to convey a deep balance like those by Andy Sotiriou, whose series "Snowscapes" captures snow-covered fields crossed by random lines of vegetation, or Alfonso Zubiaga, who interprets the relationship between the land and the sea with images of high-contrast and great serenity in his work "Binario". In this same way, José Quintanilla also uses cultivated fields in which, suddenly, an anonymous and washed-out construction emerges. His project "My house, my tree" conveys a deep nostalgia with retro aesthetic photographs and ochre-pastel tones.

Andy Sotiriou

Snowscape 29, 2014

Photography, mineral pigments on paper

60 x 60cm

Alfonso Zubiaga

Binario 1, 2017

Photography

55 x 74cm

José Quintanilla

Mi casa, mi árbol 15, 2015

Pigmented inks on Hahnemühle cotton paper mounted on cardboard museum

21 x 31cm

From a more dreamlike perspective, Carlos Regueira offers a dramatic vision of wooded landscapes. His "Paisajes pervertidos" reflect a morbid beauty, perhaps threatening, but at the same time reveals formal serenity and balance. These images emerge from the mist of memory and interpellate the viewer. In a similar line evolves the work of Ely Sánchez. In his series "Heridos" seeks to reveal that everything we see is an artifice, a translated image, credible but not real. On the other hand, in "Sueños geométricos" the artist focuses on the beauty of the lucid dream to experience what in real life is not feasible, thus releasing his most intimate identity.

Carlos Regueira

Malaysia, 2014

Photography

52 x 70cm

Ely Sánchez

Serie Heridos 1, 2014

Digital print

53 x 80cm

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.