MANOLO BALLESTEROS

Manolo Ballesteros’s practice explores the expressive potential of geometric abstraction through a language that is both intuitive and rigorously composed. Working with planes of color, ranging from intense, saturated tones to soft pastel palettes, Ballesteros achieves an immediately recognizable visual purity. Despite their formal clarity, his works are not tied to any specific narrative; rather, they allow color, form, and material presence to speak for themselves. At the heart of Ballesteros’s practice lies an intimate dialogue with materials, chosen for their ability to reveal both the physical and symbolic weight of form.

In recent years, Ballesteros has experimented within the field of abstraction, playing with geometric complexity through the uniformity of pigments and the reduction of outlines. After decades spent pursuing an absolute minimalism and focusing on a smooth, impeccable, and refined finish that brought his work close to the most austere ideas of color and form, Manolo Ballesteros’s style is now evolving toward an abstraction charged with greater presence and color.

In this new pictorial phase, Ballesteros ventures into a territory where geometry ceases to be a silent refuge and becomes instead a space of friction, of contained and released energy. The works gathered in this exhibition mark a turning point in his career: here, the surface no longer aspires to serenity or to the clarity of a purified gesture, but is activated as a living weave, a structure that pulses. Each painting is born from the repetition of a single gesture, a line, a stroke laden with material, that accumulates, overlaps, and is organized into imperfect grids. These patterns, far from the classical balance that characterized his earlier works, now introduce a tension between control and vibration. Form no longer merely organizes space; it pushes forward as if seeking to affirm its own physicality. The thick, visible brushstroke bears witness to this movement: an unmistakable trace of the artist’s body.

Geometry, in Ballesteros’s hands, becomes permeable. Squares and rectangles do not function as static containers, but as fields of force. Color, intense and resolute, amplifies this sensation: blazing reds, dense oranges, deep blues. The chromatic blocks do not describe a narrative, yet they propose an atmosphere, an internal rhythm, a pulse that shifts between pattern and pigment. The artist uses geometry to speak about the human condition: about our ability to create symbolic and mental spaces, but also about the limits of this ordered reason when confronted with materiality. At this point, grids, parallel lines, symmetries, and other geometric structures cease to be mere ideas and become inhabitable spaces.

The exhibition brings together large-scale works in which the repetition of the stroke generates a kind of gridded fabric. In the smaller formats, the closeness of the lines reveals an intimate vibration: the irregular breathing of the intervals, the resistance of the oil paint, the light trapped between layer and layer. In these works, painting behaves like a kind of color sequence—overlaid, blended, and disordered.

Pinturas de invierno speaks of a geometry traversed by emotion, of an order built from doubt, of a painting that ceases to be containment and becomes presence. In this new cycle, Ballesteros unfolds a language that, while still grounded in abstraction, becomes more physical and more immediate.