Xmas 2

Balta Gallery closes the year with a group exhibition built on the conviction that painting continues to be a fertile space from which to think about the world and to situate oneself within it. The works brought together here belong to a selection of the most relevant artists from Cantabria, who through their practice construct a place of exploration through painting: a realm where light, matter, and gesture become forms of resonance—gestures capable of activating memories, intuitions, and a sensitivity that does not linger on the immediate, but rather on the creation and consolidation of a language of one’s own.

It is through the works in this exhibition that Balta Gallery, once again, proposes activating forms of sensitivity that resist the speed of the present, focusing on artists whose work stands out for a strong personal imprint and a singular approach to contemporary creation. The exhibition proposes a journey through diverse pictorial positions that enter into dialogue with one another from the autonomy of each language, without renouncing a sense of unity. Far from proposing a homogeneous reading, the exhibition embraces multiplicity, and each artist unfolds a practice grounded in research, artistic coherence, a consolidated trajectory, and an intimate relationship with the act of looking, resonating with traditions from art history.

The exhibition not only displays works, but also proposes an expanded reflection on painting and its capacity to endure, reinvent itself, and offer new territories of interpretation. In this sense, the extensive career and dedication of Joaquín Martínez Cano are situated in a subtle balance between light and shadow, where pictorial structure seems to be sustained in a state of continuous transformation. Heir to the northern landscape tradition, the artist unfolds and recomposes the image through chromatic balances on canvas, presenting work that oscillates between the concrete and the intangible. Each of his pieces appears to be sustained in a sway between presence and dissolution, as if the landscape were a breathing organism.

In contrast, Mónica Dixon generates silences within her pictorial spaces. Her works seem to be situated in the moment after the pause, on the exact threshold where something might happen but has not yet occurred. This dramatic containment connects with Hopper’s introspective realism, although in Dixon the figures disappear and the entire narrative is suggested by space crossed by a light that fractures the composition. In her small formats, the gaze enters into the tension of space: the precise brushstroke guides the eye, almost like a choreographed breath. Light unfolds through meticulously worked gradients that envelop the scene in an aura of expectation.

From fluidity, the painter Beatriz Elorza swiftly composes a vegetal choreography: forms that suggest leaves, shoots, or organic movements, executed in a vibrant and luminous manner. Trained in architecture and later in painting in New York, she combines structural precision with a loose, vitalist stroke. Her works unfold through delicate palettes containing internal glimmers, as if the surface were affected by wind. Chromatic games among softened pinks, greens, turquoises, and yellows evoke physical sensations: in her artistic research, Elorza does not seek to represent nature, but to translate its impulse.

The only sculptural works in the exhibition belong to the Cantabrian painter and printmaker Eloy Velázquez, for whom wood is origin, memory, and protagonist. Far from treating it as a neutral material, the artist recognizes in each grain a story of its own, and it is common for each piece to hold a narrative about its provenance: a tree that grew in a specific place, a beam salvaged from an old construction, a stump found on the beach after a storm. Through a solid trajectory, his work combines research, craftsmanship, and sensitivity. Velázquez reveals the human figure from the material itself, as if it emerged from it out of necessity, and his works—always charged with humanity—raise questions about identity, vulnerability, and empathy, inviting reflections on social justice, the human condition, and belonging.

From another perspective, Roberto Orallo transfers to canvas and large formats his exploration of the human and the existential as a central axis. His pieces interrogate inner and interpersonal relationships, creating scenes where geometry seems to tense and reconstruct itself with each gaze. The artist works from a profound humanism: each composition is an organism in dialogue, where figures, contexts, silences, and tensions are organized like an emotional architecture. This stylistic plurality, nourished by decades of pictorial research, has allowed him to consolidate a language of his own—recognizable and fully current. His recent works are situated in an introspective, almost wintry sphere: a moment of reflection in which color appears both fractured and vibrant, sustaining the psychological intensity of the figures. Since the 1970s, Orallo has been an indisputable reference in Cantabrian art, capable of constructing images that transform the viewer and reconfigure their inner geometry.

From those interior spaces, Nieves Moriano also seems to work, whose abstract landscapes function as emotional experiences that reflect an inner feeling. Her works possess an almost tactile delicacy thanks to a careful treatment of light and glazes. In them, one senses a territory that is not necessarily real, but rather a space suspended between dream and memory. Sueño verde, one of her most evocative canvases, unfolds an imaginary that combines poetic sensitivity and chromatic exploration. Moriano constructs intimate landscapes where nature appears as a state of consciousness. In her painting there is a desire for movement forward, for an opening toward possible futures, as if each composition were a window onto a luminous introspection.

Manolo Oyonarte bursts in with intense pictorial energy, combining dripping, tearing, stark contrasts, and an incisive relationship with black that draws on the impulse of gestural abstraction. His fragmented, vibrant surfaces seem to be constructed from the conflict between control and impulse, between calculation and eruption. Colors appear as flashes, fleeting nuances, heartbeats that avoid stridency and integrate into a structure that sustains the force of the gesture. Oyonarte transforms pictorial space into a field of dynamic tension, where form and rhythm coexist with conceptual introspection.

The painting of José Antonio Quintana emerges from a productive tension between gesture, matter, and image construction. Quintana incorporates pigments and non-conventional elements such as paper, earth, graphite, metals like iron or bronze, and sand to articulate scenes that function more as triggers for process than as closed narratives. His works pass through phases of controlled chaos that the artist slowly orders. Although his work begins from figuration, form has evolved toward increasing visual refinement.

The works brought together here show how painting, in its multiple directions, continues to be a space for thought, emotion, and discovery. From light to matter, from gesture to silence, each artist expands the horizon of the visible and reveals modes of perception through their artistic practice. Balta Gallery thus proposes a journey that invites viewers to look calmly, to pause and breathe with the image; a space where the spectator can recognize themselves in pulsing materials, in landscapes that suggest other times, in figures that interrogate, or in abstractions that open doors toward the unknown. The exhibition becomes a shared territory where painting demonstrates its relevance, its capacity for reinvention, and its ability to continue generating questions that will accompany us.