Bienal de Pontevedra

In the works of Antonio Ballester Moreno (1977, Madrid, Spain), simple shapes and his primary colour palette become a gateway into the essential. He uses materials such as raw canvas, jute or untreated clay, which highlight a handmade aesthetics, close to popular and everyday elements. His creative universe takes nature, education, folklore and oral culture as a starting point to build an abstract and symbolic language defying the logics of traditional representation. In this process, he claims non-academic expressions like children's drawing, craftwork or pre-modern techniques, moving away from industrial sophistication to explore a more intuitive, collective and human art. Gesture and repetition do not seek originality and instead work as resistance practices against the spectacular regime of contemporary image. In his universe, everything – nature, learning, popular culture, pedagogy and aesthetic experience – is connected as intertwined fragments of the same story.