Paco Dalmau

The Evolution series by Paco Dalmau builds upon a legacy in which painting becomes a space for introspection, transformation, and the articulation of the self. This approach connects with the Abstract Expressionists—artists like Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, or Jackson Pollock—who treated painting as a medium for existential reflection, where gesture and matter embodied interior life. For Dalmau, this serves as a foundation rather than a model. While his work shares their introspective sensibility, it focuses more specifically on the layered and mutable nature of identity over time.

Carl Jung’s notion of the psyche as a constellation of overlapping selves—conscious, unconscious, and ancestral—provides a psychological framework that resonates with Dalmau’s practice. Each work in Evolution takes form through accumulation: of memory, emotional states, and inherited experience. These wall-based pieces operate as quiet excavations of the self, where fragments of past identities remain embedded and visible. Rather than aiming to unify or resolve, they allow the complexity of personal history to remain open and legible.

For Dalmau, Evolution is not a project confined to the studio, but part of a broader, ongoing process of self-construction. “How many selves have existed within me? How have I arrived at this moment?” These questions are not rhetorical—they guide the rhythm of his work. Each piece signals the emergence of a new state, built from the accumulation of layered experience. Through the hybrid language of painting and sculpture, Dalmau invites us to consider identity not as something fixed, but as a continuous unfolding—marked by memory, shaped by history, and never complete.