Maria Argüelles

Women Prefer Women with Curves is a series that explores the female body as an emotional territory and an architecture of meanings. Curves —understood not only as physical form, but as trajectories, deviations, nooks, and lines that are not straight— become metaphors for that which in life also does not follow a direct path: traumas, desires, contradictions, memories that accumulate in folds. Each figure embodies a story that is not told, but intuited: bodies that speak from their inclinations, from their foreshortenings, from the precise movements that reveal more than they hide. The series poses an essential question that remains suspended in each work: Who really moves the body? Willpower, desire, injury, or something we have not yet been able to name?

14 works in the series

Memories of Lanzarote is a series that addresses painting as a mechanism for emotional reconstruction and as an executor of memories that seek not precision, but intensity. Here, the present of the gaze is not prioritized because the present —always brief, always insufficient— is incompatible with the deep nature of memory. The project is situated in a suspended space, an in-between: between the experience that triggered the emotion and the making of the pictorial act. That waiting, that interval where memory reorganizes, softens, exaggerates, or invents, is fundamental to the series. Painting from memory means painting hypotheses: possible versions of what was lived, worlds that did not exist but could have been, distortions that are not corrected because they allow questions to be opened that sustain fiction.

6 works in the series

A house is composed of small pictorial supports that explore atmosphere as an emotional space where the explicit is suspended to give prominence to that which permeates without fully revealing itself. An atmosphere that invites entry, that hints without imposing, that opens a threshold to the stories underlying sentimental ruptures. The series addresses fear not as paralysis, but as revelation: from the wound emerge beginnings, fragments that recall the original crack and allow hypotheses to be formulated about how to navigate grief. Fear becomes a guide, an architect of new ways of inhabiting oneself.

5 works in the series

This last series brings together the artist's remaining works as a space for synthesis and opening. The research is articulated around several lines that run through her entire practice: the reflection on the possibilities of painting in contemporaneity —what it means to paint today and from where— and its capacity to function simultaneously as an archive and as a narrative. Painting appears here as a place of accumulation, of memory and of storytelling, but also as a territory permeable to other disciplines. From this perspective, the work insists on the need to dissolve the boundaries traditionally imposed on the pictorial medium, incorporating transversality as an essential condition of the process. At the same time, the series explores the space of friction between the intimate and the public, questioning how these spheres blur, contaminate, or mutually transgress each other.

26 works in the series