ANTONIO BALLESTER MORENO

His relationship with the Brazilian public began in 2018, when he took part in the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo - Afinidades afetivas [Affective Affinities], in the sentido/ comum nucleus, also working as an artist-curator. In 2024, he presented his first solo exhibition in Brazil with Água (verde), at Gomide&Co. With a critical essay by Taísa Palhares, the show brought together large paintings on jute and visual compositions that suggest dynamic and interdependent systems. According to Palhares, the exhibition environment was constituted as a kind of continuous route, in which the landscape was configured by the recombination of elements, establishing its own time of fruition.

Although his approach has references in abstraction, Ballester Moreno’s work evokes compositional aspects that become evident as the artist understands his work as relational: hardly any of his canvases are conceived in isolation. For him, the paintings function as parts of an expanded field, in dialog with each other. His process also investigates art’s ability to transcend boundaries—both in the artistic and pedagogical worlds—approaching a practice that he describes as ‘art in lowercase letters’, accessible, shareable and aimed at collective experience.

His production favors manual work and ways of recombining sensitive knowledge, proposing a reconnection with natural rhythms in the face of the acceleration of contemporary societies. By using materials such as jute and techniques such as collage, Ballester Moreno proposes forms of symbolic access that dialogue with pedagogies that stand in opposition to neoliberal celerity. Ballester Moreno’s career has been marked by formal rigor and a poetics focused on the collective. His inclusion in Gomide&Co’s program reaffirms the gallery’s commitment to artists whose work expands the possibilities of perception and shared experience.

Antonio Ballester Moreno’s work is in the collections of institutions and museums such as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, in Madrid; the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León - MUSAC, in Léon; the Pérez Art Museum and the Colección Ella Fontanals Cisneros, in Miami; the Fondation Louis Vuitton, in Paris, among others.

Text courtesy Gomide&Co.