Bienal de Pontevedra

At the Pontevedra Biennial, Miki Leal presents two works that, although shown in different spaces, share the same intention of imagining a better, friendlier world. Both works, jointly entitled La felicidad de la vida privada (The happiness of private life, 2025), comprises a set of ceramics holding plants and a pair of paintings that symbolically refer to the landscape genre. Over the last few years, ceramics have played an essential role in Miki Leal's work, not only due to their closeness to manual labour and handmade products, but also because of their ability to connect with everyday life and with certain affective references linked to his personal context, to the use of tiles in Seville, his home town. The ceramics subtly dialogue with the work of Miki Kratsman with which they share space, and whose photographs document territories marked by violence, the demolition of Bedouin homes. However, there is something that remains in these images: the plants, the gardens, the trees. As if, in the midst of the devastation, the vegetation resisted disappearing. While Kratsman shows the landscape as a trace of loss, Leal does it as desire, as possibility. From very different perspectives, both artists show how even the most fragile thing - a plant, an improvised garden - can become a sign of resistance, memory or future. In addition, Leal's paintings do not document real landscapes, but invent them, superimposing memories and references to build ambiguous scenes that act more as atmospheres than as representations. In this game between the false and the possible, Leal does not seek fidelity, but a way of opening the world to new readings.