Pepe Pétalo - El Jardín Prohibido

Pepe Pétalo develops a personal imaginary of the artist, a territory where spontaneous drawing, intuitive gesture and memory transform into painting. The origin of his work goes back to adolescence, when he began to draw a little figure with a large nose in the margins of his school notes, on napkins, or in textbooks. Those doodles, born almost as an unconscious act, have over time become the seed of his own artistic language.

Pepe Pétalo has developed over 25 years of professional activity in the Social Work of the now-defunct Caja de Ahorros del Mediterráneo, where in his final stage he was responsible for the Culture area and coordinator of the CAM Contemporary Art Collection, currently housed in the Alicante Museum of Contemporary Art (MACA). From that position, he actively participated in the design and organization of numerous traveling exhibitions across Spain, as well as in promoting emerging artists.

Throughout his career he has had the opportunity to know and collaborate with distinguished creators such as Carmen Calvo, Eduardo Arroyo, Cristina García Rodero and Cristina de Middel, the latter President of the Magnum Photos Agency (Princess of Asturias Award for Concord). This proximity to contemporary art from cultural management has nourished his outlook, although his pictorial proposal remains faithful to the freshness and authenticity of the original stroke.

Pepe Pétalo’s painting does not seek solemnity or distance. On the contrary, it aims to be a lure for smiles, distraction, and the reconnection with that playful part that often dissolves in adult life. His little figures and doodles, seemingly simple, hide a reflection on identity, memory, and the ability to create without fear of judgment.

“Universe Pétalo. Little figures and doodles” ultimately represents the public consolidation of an artistic universe that has accompanied the author since his youth and that now unfolds with maturity, coherence, and a clear vocation to connect with the spectator through direct emotion, complicity... and why not... humor.

The Forbidden Garden invites us to enter an enigmatic territory, where nature seems to grow through signs, doodles, and color strokes. On a dark, earthy background appear shapes that recall flowers, roots, branches, and imaginary organisms, crossed by black lines that seem like paths or boundaries. The intense colors — turquoises, reds, yellows, pinks, and whites — create a wild energy, as if the garden were alive and hiding something we cannot decipher. In different spaces small symbols and invented writings emerge, authentic secret languages that suggest hidden messages. The work thus plays between the vegetal and the mysterious, between the spontaneous and the symbolic, turning the painting into a doorway to a new and unknown world.

The framed dimensions marked for the work are those of the painting once stretched and mounted on the stretcher. The real measurements of the canvas are larger to enable its mounting.

The work goes unframed (professional packaging, rolled in a tube). It is delivered with a certificate of authenticity.

You can follow my work on Instagram
@pepepetalo