The word instinct comes from the Latin instinctus, meaning impulse or motivation. Its prefix in indicates that this impulse comes from within, from the interior. It describes a behavior that is non-reflective, triggered by stimuli or feelings. Instinct is the result of unconscious mental processes — it could be defined as “listening to the heart.”

The exhibition PICTORIAL INSTINCT, featuring the work of Xavi Ceerre (Alcoy, 1988), Xavi García (Monòver, 1974), and Taher Jaoui (Tunis, 1978), delves into the direct and spontaneous drive behind contemporary painting. It is a return to primal roots — to that childhood state filled with sincerity and freedom.

The three artists follow a creative process guided by intuition and the subconscious, embracing the unexpected. They provoke accidents that push their paintings beyond established limits. Their work, full of erasures, mistakes, mixtures, and overlaps, destroys in order to create. In this way, the medium becomes the message, resulting in direct painting of great strength and power that surprises the viewer. These compositions attract through the play of opposing forces, where a seemingly random chaos is, in fact, organically ordered — a natural, unforced order akin to what we see in nature, charged with tensions, pauses, and energies.

This is an abstraction rooted in sincerity, seeking free interpretation. The paintings are rich in fusions of forms, vibrant colors, signs, and expressive gestures, shaping a captivating and meticulous body of work. They establish a physical dialogue — back and forth — that reflects an outward gaze, underlining the importance of our surroundings. It is an intimate, reflective perspective that reiterates how everything happening around us influences and conditions us, questioning the way individuals relate to their environment and making the city, as a primary context, a key source of inspiration.

Xavi Ceerre, Xavi García, and Taher Jaoui base their work on the construction of a variety of singular elements. In their paintings, connections and mixtures emerge, combining an expressionist character with Cubist concepts, Dadaist elements, naïve features, glitch aesthetics influenced by digital art, African art, and references to cartoons and comics. Central to this is the use of color through aggressive strokes that appear as stimuli scattered across their compositions — a perfect coexistence of chaos and balance, where the guiding forces are impulses and sensations.