Próxima estación | Pablo Álvarez

Next Stop is a reinterpretation of Carlos de Haes' Picos de Europa, a landscape painting in the collection of the Museo del Prado. The work starts from this historical image to activate a dialogue between pictorial tradition and the way we relate to images today. The main intervention consists of moving one of the trees from the original landscape and decorating it with garlands, introducing a comic and kind gesture that alters the scene and breaks with the solemnity of the reference. At the bottom appears the entrance to the Jerónimos Monastery of the Museo del Prado, which has been previously scanned using photogrammetry, digitized, and processed in Blender before being transferred to the painting. The title comes from a comment by a studio mate, who pointed out that this entrance could look like a subway entrance. I am particularly interested in this interpretation because, by decontextualizing the image, what we recognize as an institutional element can transform into something else. Again, the work activates a play between images and contexts, where meaning is not fixed but dependent on the gaze. The piece thus functions as a double meta-image game: on the one hand, the painting dialogues with another painting; on the other, it incorporates the museum itself as an image within the image. Added to this are digital ruins, understood not as criticism, but as a form of representation that alludes to the fragmented, the virtual, and the construction of contemporary memory. The painting proposes a connection with our cultural heritage, addressing the world of images from a narrative that crosses the classical and the contemporary. The use of oil paint as a traditional technique coexists with technological tools such as scanners and 3D modeling, reinforcing painting as a space where different times and languages overlap.