Carmen Valero - Breathing Layers

This large-format work is the result of a prolonged, almost ritual process that unfolds over time. Its construction is articulated through successive layers of colour, glazes, and repeated revisions of the surface, each requiring pauses, drying periods, and methodical returns. The final image is the sedimentation of multiple pictorial decisions: one stratum over another, one memory over the next. The painting does not rely on gesture alone; it is a slow architecture.
The visual language of the piece operates within a fertile tension between Abstract Expressionism and a contemporary reinterpretation of Baroque sensibility. From Abstract Expressionism, it draws the primacy of process, the expanded gesture, and the openness of the canvas as an energetic field. From the Baroque, it reclaims visual complexity, chromatic theatricality, and an enveloping atmosphere that seems to exceed the limits of the support.
The palette—deep greens, saturated magentas, warm yellows, luminous pinks, ultramarine blues, and touches of white and ochre—forms a vibrant chromatic system organised in diagonals and densities that evoke folds, foliage, or internal currents. Colour functions not only as matter, but as structure and breath.