Paco Dalmau

Paco Dalmau understands his work as a study of perception, attending to what is not manifest (greys, distances, voids) rather than fixing on a recognisable central subject. He seeks to propose images that sustain a measured mystery, inviting interpretation and lived experience. In the studio he works from within and proposes outward, using colour, composition, and perspective as a communicative language. As a historical example, Monet’s foggy London views help illustrate a shift from subject matter to the conditions of seeing, where the figurative recedes and reality is sensed rather than described, always in flux. From there, Dalmau shifts into the sculptural, developing Evolution as a body of wall-based pieces.

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. If Monet helps the spectator to situate the perceptual and compositional questions, from field of vision to light, colour and structure, the Abstract Expressionists frame the work’s existential orientation. This approach connects with artists such as Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler and Jackson Pollock, who approached painting as an existential inquiry or a field where colour carries meaning, with gesture and material presence embodying 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, with layered surfaces, 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.