PAOLO SALVADOR AT CARLIER | GEBAUER: BETWEEN MATTER AND THE SPIRITUAL

Paolo Salvador (Lima, Peru, 1990) arrives at the Madrid space of carlier | gebauer with a selection of paintings representing several of his recent bodies of work. The exhibition reveals an exploration of the relationship between body, anthropomorphism, zoology, memory, and matter, articulated through a visual language rooted in Peruvian cosmology. In dialogue with both his origins and his later European training, his works construct spaces where hybrid and spectral figures oscillate between the human and the mythical.

While the themes and outcomes of his practice open up relevant fields of inquiry—such as the symbolism embedded in the figures that inhabit his paintings—his material research emerges as a key axis for understanding his work. From producing his own linen supports using alpaca fabric to developing pigments and working with a wide range of organic materials, his processes combine technical precision with an underlying intuitive experimentation.

In his most recent work, Salvador incorporates handwoven textiles produced in collaboration with artisans from his home country, integrating textile construction into his pictorial practice. In this way, the support ceases to be a merely technical element and becomes an active part of the work, altering the relationship between image, body, and surface.

The exhibition also deepens the symbolic dimension present in Salvador’s work. His animals—never fully defined nor strictly realistic—function as unstable figures that refer both to ancestral imaginaries and to contemporary psychological and spiritual states. Influenced by Andean mythologies, biblical narratives, and Western references, the artist constructs solitary and fragmented figures that appear suspended between different modes of existence.

Paolo Salvador can be seen until 26 July at carlier | gebauer, José Marañón 4, Madrid (Spain).