Regar el acuario | Pablo Álvarez

In this work, I start from an absurd action: watering an aquarium. That impossible gesture activates a scene that functions as a loop of images within images. The process here is key. There is no preliminary sketch. I start by building a landscape and, little by little, I move from representing it to inhabiting it. That transition is fundamental to understanding the painting. I take my time to decide what to "plant," what elements to introduce, how to make them coexist. I work from intuition, but also from waiting: the drying time of the oil paint itself sets the rhythm, forces me to stop, to think, to revisit what I've done. The image does not appear all at once, it is built layer by layer. Through photogrammetry, I have scanned my own studio and painted it within the composition, giving it the main focus. Inside its walls, there are my works and pieces by my partner Fernando Molina; even the painting itself is present, generating a repetition effect. This loop has a certain psychedelic character: the image folds back on itself and questions what is original and what is copy. The background functions as a false seabed that actually starts from a desert. It is a crossing of contexts. The flowers and plants are inspired by marine forms, while the bubbles float independently, reinforcing that ambiguous atmosphere. There are nods to art history, such as the fishbone that refers to Salvador Dalí's Endless Enigma or the flowers that suggest human bodies, in a line close to Hieronymus Bosch. At the same time, I mix pictorial tradition—oil paint, manual work, slow construction—with technological innovation, using scanners and photogrammetry as tools to generate and transfer digital spaces to the canvas. It is a reflection on meta-images, but also on the act of painting itself today: how to coexist with the digital without renouncing time, material, and the physical experience of painting.