Metabolism is the organic process by which living things synthesize substances. This scientific statement, from a cultural perspective, seems to me that it can be understood as a kind of metaphor - and even more, as the metaphorization itself - of the processes in which culture is in operation, in two senses: one, as a process organic and "natural" that occurs individually, that is, it produces subjectivity; and two, as a trans-subjective process, one that in a broader field than that of individualities, allows its emergence from relationships of interdependence. In other words, the conformation of the world is individual and therefore collective.  And let's understand the collective as a complex universe that includes actors as well as actants (paintings as well as painter). Comserse el ojo (Eating the eye) because we have to assimilate the look - and the painting - as metabolic processes.
  So we present… a painting exhibition. Or of paintings? The unity of this exhibition has something of a problem.  
  It is a fact that as an artistic practice, painting has enjoyed a privileged reputation compared to other forms of art, however, there was a moment in the last century - at least since the sixties - when this was not exactly the case and rather there was a great tendency on the part of a good number of critics as well as artists, even some painters, to "terminate" or rather "assassinate" the painting. Historically this was a response to the high degree of stability in the theoretical convention that the ontological preeminence of painting was given in the medium, that is, that the "essence" of the practice referred to the specificity of the medium, and therefore its limitations had to be accepted as the conventional and normative principles for the pictorial task.
  In this sense, then, we can think that this resilience of painting, those constant resuscitations that we can easily corroborate today, are symptomatic of a phenomenon that can and should cease to be based on the idea of the specificity of the environment and that today raises a fertile space for speculations around the relationality of this practice in addition to itself, that is, of its apparent confinement in a specific environment, to then approach it in those moments in which it relates / re-models / re-makes-with other practices and media, within an ecology of mediatized and globalizing images that constitute distribution spaces, identity brands, arenas of agency.
  In other words, in this exhibition we think of painting as a space for the production of relational agencies that have historically constituted the practice in  various dimensions: as a genre, or as a technique, or a medium, or specific processes, or an institution ... For us, painting is all these transits, and we find it disseminated in culture as a complex set. In this sense, the exhibition is presented as an open journey through these broad considerations on painting. Open inasmuch as it does not intend to circumscribe partial aspects of the work of each artist to an interpretative and distant theoretical statement, but simply to give rise to a putting into play of the body-of-work / process of four different artists, each displaying their own subjectivity, at no time seeking to compose a representative proposal, as if they were homologous; here each one is presented as a complete proposal insofar as each aspect of their work participates in what we understand as the space of painting, the possible space of painting, to which we seek to contribute here.

Manuel Sentíes