MAITE Y MANUEL

Their world is anything but serene. In it, paint drips, spills over, twists itself into the grotesque and the erotic, the tender and the viscous. Their images are like expired candies: sweet at first, then acidic, finally corrupt. Maite y Manuel create a pictorial territory that destabilizes form, where the rotten and the sweet merge into a single texture, generating a constant pulse of transformation. André Breton once said, “Beauty will be convulsive or it will not be,” and it is within this jolt, this convulsion, that their work unfolds. Like an echo of surrealist psychic automatism, their creative process stems from impulsive gestures, from shared drawing unfiltered by rational censorship, where images emerge with the urgency of the unconscious.

In their studio, stains and strokes coexist in deliberate chaos. Upon arriving in La Bisbal, they covered the floor with raw canvases and began to draw: pastel dust, pencil marks, rain-soaked mud, and their own footprints gradually formed the foundation of their paintings. The environment seeped into the work uninvited, embedding itself in every layer of matter. The accumulation of pigment at the edges of their pieces mimics the way color builds up on the spines of sketchbooks, making their paintings breathe as if they were pages torn from a private journal.

Maite y Manuel work from intuition, from raw gestures, unafraid of stains or exaggeration. Their figures emerge between the sticky and the soft, the liquid and the solid, mutant, ambiguous, witnesses to perpetual transformation. Like a bag of sweets forgotten at the bottom of a purse, what once seemed harmless has transformed into something new, something alive, something still pulsing. Their canvases hold humor, chaos, and an unapologetic delight in deformity; hybrid creatures contort between desire and monstrosity. And among them, two recurring figures are drawn and redrawn: themselves, Maite y Manuel, displaced into a space of play and confrontation, where the line between the beautiful and the repulsive is razor-thin.

The result is a body of work that challenges the stability of form, expanding like a stain and contracting into the smallest of details. These paintings sweat, absorbing the atmosphere and spitting it back in raw form, a feast where the childish and the perverse mix together with no rules. Here, everything decays as you watch, everything mutates, everything perspires. Rotten Candy: the sticky, the shiny, the putrid, and the seductive coexist within a single image, like a melting candy that leaves an unsettling aftertaste.