José Luis Barquero Spanish, b. 1998

Barquero works as an open system that moves between image, gesture, and scene. His practice uses direct mechanisms —the body, error, urgency— to alter representational logic, generating images that are never fully realized. There is an interest in how the present affects form and how form, in turn, reorganizes the sensible. The figures that appear are vestiges of an action rather than projections of a story. Painting doesn’t represent, but rather produces conditions, affective force, diversion.

He asks —without formulating it— whether an image is still possible that doesn’t codify desire, that doesn’t affirm a subject, that doesn’t aspire to endure. How is a political body constructed when the image has ceased to promise a future?

There is, however, a quiet metaphysical tension that runs through this refusal —as if in renouncing affirmation, something else, more elusive, becomes palpable. Not presence, not absence, but a threshold. The image, no longer a bearer of truths or ideals, opens instead to an experience of suspension —where meaning is delayed, and perception is sensitized. In this suspended state, something like the spiritual enters, not as doctrine or transcendence, but as the faint vibration of what resists being seen.