I find myself asking this question more and more often: why, and for what purpose, continue constructing images through painting over days, in an era in which we can generate unprecedented images in seconds?

My name is Pablo Álvarez, I am from Madrid and I am 31 years old. My research takes landscape as a starting point to explore contemporary issues. For centuries, landscape was a pictorial genre that accompanied and enveloped the life of a character or an event; it was the setting where something happened. In my pictorial practice, I use landscape as a space I inhabit with symbolic elements, generating scenes that function as visual metaphors, open to multiple interpretations.

Through my paintings, I reflect on how we consume images and experiences today. I am interested in observing how we have moved from inhabiting the world to collecting it: traveling, looking, living, almost as if accumulating trophies. These ideas do not appear literally, but are transformed into suggestive and ambiguous images that invite a slow and personal reading.

On the occasion of the exhibition on February 26 at S.Gallery in Madrid, I present a series composed of nine paintings that address this reflection through different symbolic scenarios, understood as spaces of projection, contemplation, and tension between the real and the represented.

I am particularly concerned with our current relationship with images. We live dependent on immediacy and overstimulation; we construct exaggerated or fictitious digital identities and inhabit screens that function as portals to artificial universes, governed by perfection, spectacle, and misinformation. My proposal combines pictorial tradition and technological innovation. I use oil paint as an artisanal medium that connects me with our cultural heritage and, at the same time, incorporate tools such as scanning or 3D modeling to generate digital spaces where, in a more intuitive and direct way, I can freely construct and deconstruct images.

I understand painting as a means of returning to the material and the handmade, as a way of reconnecting with our roots. Painting forces me to be patient and reflective, confronts me with time, and places me in a position of humility. Through it, I connect with other people and use it as a tool to understand and inhabit the world.