I consider painting to be a form of resistance that begins in the very act of painting. It is not a matter of conveying ideas or issuing messages, but of working with time, with matter, and with attention. Painting requires slowness, an attunement to the unfolding of brushstrokes in dialogue with the pictorial theme, the contact with the support, and the impossibility of acceleration without losing something essential. To paint is to sustain a rhythm of one’s own, distinct from the rapid production of images and their immediate consumption. This resistance appears, above all, as fidelity to the way in which a painting comes into formation, step by step, prior to any consideration of how it will be seen or interpreted.

This way of painting does not end in the studio. For this reason, my presence during the exhibition is neither a performance nor an added strategy, but a natural continuation of that same mode of working. Just as the painting does not present itself as a closed message or as an object for rapid consumption, the encounter with visitors does not aim to explain or to direct what they should think. Rather, it is a matter of allowing the painting to continue showing itself, also within the exhibition space, and of attending to how the works and their installation are perceived by others: which aspects draw attention, which rhythms or tensions are felt when looking at them over time.

The responses that arise in these encounters do not function as external opinions or expert judgments, but as expressions of lived experience. From them, a future relation may open up in which meaning belongs neither solely to the artist nor solely to the viewer, but comes into formation in the encounter between both, on the basis of the painting. Meaning ceases to be fixed in advance and instead is sustained within a concrete relation, grounded in the physical presence of the work and in the way it addresses the one who looks at it.

This type of relation gives rise, so to speak, to a discreet proximity. It is not something to be displayed nor something that can be generalized, but something that occurs between concrete persons, in singular encounters. It is discreet because it does not seek to become a model nor to be mechanically repeated. Within this proximity, the relation may gradually deepen, according to what is generated in each encounter, without the need to turn it into spectacle or to formalize it.

Although this attention to the viewer may recall certain participatory practices known in contemporary art, the point of departure here is different. Resistance does not consist in activating the viewer nor in dissolving the work into an open process, but in maintaining the painting at the center. To acknowledge that painting has already explored many of its formal possibilities does not mean abandoning it, but rather asking where it may still bear meaning today.

Novelty does not lie in inventing new languages nor in leaving older ones behind, but in how they are employed to make possible real encounters with concrete persons. There are no superior or inferior media, nor any automatic preference for the new over the old. Any pictorial expression is valid insofar as it serves to render visible a concrete situation of life, illuminated by the presence of the painting.

From this standpoint, the work may acquire a new character without the need to found a style or to inscribe itself within a movement. The center of creation shifts from large labels and general narratives toward real, personal, and communal relations, understood as bonds that are built and sustained over time around a concrete work.

In the current context, marked by rapid consumption and the constant proliferation of images, this insistence on matter, slowness, and encounter may appear ineffective. Yet it is precisely there that its strength resides. By not subjecting the painting to the logic of immediate visibility nor to the construction of a recognizable identity as a brand, this practice introduces a silent friction with the dominant mode of producing and consuming culture. It may employ contemporary tools or traditional languages, but without relinquishing the direct experience of looking and of being in the presence of the work.

From this perspective, art made with non-digital means has not come to an end. It has reached a point at which it can transform its mode of situating itself. Resistance no longer consists in defending one medium against another, but in sustaining, through the act of painting, a mode of appearing that allows different resources to converge in order to give meaning to concrete situations.

This implies accepting a certain simplicity of approach and carrying it out without hesitation. The meanings that arise may be described in terms of how the work has been made and how it is received, yet they are never fully exhausted in such descriptions. Between the way the painting shows itself and makes itself felt, and the way someone pauses before it, a unique bond is formed that cannot be fully captured in words or analysis.

It is not, therefore, an art outside history. It is an art situated on a proximate plane, composed of individual trajectories and immediate encounters that the work itself makes possible. Perhaps this form of resistance, rooted in the gesture of painting, does not propose a rupture or a new beginning, but rather recognizes an orientation that has always been there: to attend to what takes place when a painting and a person truly encounter one another.