Fotografía. Gonzalo González de Vega y Pomar

Painting is understood as a form of thought. Each work is born from an intuition or an investigation and develops through a dialogue with the canvas. The main medium is oil on raw canvas and in large format, using drawing, glazes, and color. The scale requires shifting distance and granting time to the gaze.

The work explores the human being, transformation, and that which transcends us. It investigates archetypes, symbols, and structures of thought that cut across eras and cultures. In each piece, these questions find an open-ended formulation.

Fotogra´fía. @isabelg_foto

The Archetype

There are structures that persist. Their manifestations, contexts, and languages change, but they retain something recognizable.

Jung understood this recurrence as a manifestation of the archetype: deep forms of the psyche that do not possess a single image, yet reappear under different faces.

The work focuses precisely on that territory. In Fighter, symbols of struggle, beauty, and transformation from diverse imaginaries converge in a single figure. In Ikigae, the body becomes a territory: tattoos, animals, and signs are layered over the bare board until they are brought together beneath the resin.

The aim is not to represent the archetype, but to observe how it takes shape again. Painting gathers images that seem to precede us and returns them transformed.

The Path

Every path begins before taking the first step. It begins in the possibility of choosing and in the intuition of other directions.

The path belongs to the great archetypes of human experience: quest, trial, loss, transformation, and return. Walking it means passing through different states of oneself.

The Thresholds

Here, the path ceases to be merely an archetype and becomes an experience. Awakening, Labyrinth, Metamorphosis, and Illumination are born from the same search: four states of an inner journey that, through painting, questions what it means to cross one’s own consciousness.

In painting, the symbol ceases to be a fixed reference. It shifts, overlaps, and transforms until it acquires a new meaning in the relationships established within the image itself. As the journey progresses, my way of painting also changes: figure, architecture, door, and circle gradually give way to color, matter, and light.

From Awakening to Illumination, the transformation reaches the pictorial language itself. Each work is a threshold: the path does not offer an answer, but a space in which painting continues to formulate the question.

Awakening

First work in the series The Thresholds, Awakening addresses the moment of becoming aware as the beginning of a transformation. The composition is structured around a black circle that draws the gaze and creates a tension with the symbolic density of the surface.

The work brings together references to the mystical tradition and the search for knowledge. Its pictorial organization requires alternating between observing the whole and reading the detail: each approach alters the relationships between the images. Awakening thus acquires a perceptive dimension, linked to the ability to reconsider what is believed to be known.

Labyrinth

In Labyrinth, the organization of pictorial space follows a structure of correspondences between angelic figures, colors, and symbolic hierarchies. These elements form an architecture that alludes to different traditions of representing the invisible world.

The second work in the series The Thresholds introduces the loss of orientation as part of the transformation process. The dwellings of Saint Teresa and the night of Saint John of the Cross serve as references for reading inner space as a realm of passage and search. The multiplicity of relationships shifts attention between detail and the whole, keeping interpretation open.

Metamorphosis

In Metamorphosis, figuration dissolves amid glazes and transparencies. The superimposition of chromatic layers alters the definition of forms and places the image in a state of transition. The black core anchors the composition and introduces a pause in the expansion of color.

The third work in the series The Thresholds, it addresses transformation as a process of loss and emergence. The pictorial matter takes on a central role: the relationships between depth, opacity, and light make the passage between different states of the image perceptible.

Illumination

The latest work in the series The Thresholds, Illumination focuses pictorial research on the relationships between color, depth, and light. Successive glazes soften the contours and articulate a space in which the luminosity seems to emerge from within the surface.

The composition is organized around a luminous center whose expansion transforms the perception of the whole. The progressive dissolution of forms culminates the transition toward abstraction developed throughout the series. Color takes on a structural role and turns contemplation into an experience of depth and duration.

Being

The face is offered as a territory of sedimentation: origin, memory, and experience accumulate in a pictorial skin that gesture fragments, veils, and recomposes.

Each stratum preserves the trace of what has been lived without ever managing to enclose what we are.

Being remains while the body changes.

That contradiction is compelling: recognizing oneself as the same person while time transforms what is seen.

Beauty also belongs to that time; it appears, changes, and ultimately escapes any attempt to hold on to it.

There is also an interest in what seems contradictory within. Strength does not exclude vulnerability, just as stillness does not deny the possibility of acting. 

Perhaps being is also that: what can be contained at the same time. Strength and fragility, discipline and instinct, stillness and action. Not as opposing forces that must defeat one another, but as parts of a single existence.

What Transcends Us

There are experiences that do not end at the limits of a single life. They remain in what others remember, in what a work preserves, in what can be transmitted and transformed.

After looking toward being and traveling the paths through which it is attempted to be understood, this painting asks about that which exceeds it and continues beyond it.

What transcends us is born in that territory. Not as a statement about what exists beyond, but as an inquiry into permanence, trace, and the ways in which a presence can continue to act when its time has passed. Painting has here a particular condition: it can return to an image, separate it from its instant, and make it present in another way.

It is from there that Generation of ’27. Tribute to Hernando Viñes emerges. A photograph taken in 1936 is the starting point, but the work does not seek to reproduce the document. Archive, memory, and research permeate the figuration; each face incorporates the trace of a life, of a body of work, and of that which survived its own absence.

The painting thus displaces its protagonists from the time of the photograph in order to return them to the present. It does not portray who they were, but rather what of them continues to be.

Inmaculada López Hernández. 

Architect

Inmaculada López Hernández (Ávila, Spain) Architect. Her practice unfolds mainly through oil painting, exploring the possibilities of image, color, and matter between figuration and abstraction.

Trained in Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, composition, scale, and space permeate her pictorial language. Her research delves into being, identity, and human experience, drawing on symbol and archetype as forms that transcend the individual.

Color occupies an essential place in her work: it constructs, transforms, and dematerializes form. In that tension between presence and abstraction, painting remains a territory of discovery.