pinned.events

The Bancaja Foundation has opened the exhibition "Todo lugar es provisional" by Calo Carratalá (Torrent, Valencia, 1959) at its Valencia venue. The show revisits his distinctive approach to the natural environment after more than 30 years devoted to landscape painting, a career that has made him a leading figure in contemporary Spanish landscape art. The presentation included the president of the Bancaja Foundation, Rafael Alcón; the curator, Marisa Giménez Soler; and the artist himself. The exhibition brings together 37 large- and small-format works made between 2013 and 2026, drawn from three of Carratalá’s main series and shown together in Valencia for the first time, alongside pieces created specifically for this project. The selected works move from the snow-covered mountains of Norway, rendered with a very limited palette and marked by a stark, restrained melancholy, to the Amazon region in Brazil and Peru, where dark forests are built in pencil on paper through concise marks that trace the depth of vegetation, undergrowth, reflections, water, and sky. They also include African landscapes from Tanzania and Senegal, defined by intense greens, contours, gaps, and openings, as well as baobab trees, which Carratalá depicts in red chalk as symbols of communal strength and the support they have provided to generations. The exhibition path highlights the artist’s free, swift, and economical gesture, with sketch-like, scratched, precise, and corrected lines. Through this process of synthesis, his painting heightens the aesthetic force of landscape and creates an intimate blend of air, color, and time.