With COME CLOSER, ABC-ARTE presents the first solo exhibition in Milan by Antonio Ovejero (Valencia, 1999), a young Spanish artist whose figurative painting explores the relationship between memory, identity, and material culture.
Curated by Domenico de Chirico, the project stems from the desire to focus on what usually remains at the margins of our imagination: objects, surfaces, textures, decorations, and details that acquire renewed centrality through painting.
Ovejero’s work originates in a universe deeply rooted in the domestic sphere, particularly the feminine one. Porcelain, jewellery, textiles, flowers, decorative patterns, accessories, and furnishing objects compose sumptuous, highly visual scenes in which everyday life is transformed into a vehicle for memory. The elements depicted often come from the artist’s collection of personal belongings or from objects discovered in markets, shops, and ordinary spaces of everyday life. Photographed, rearranged, and subsequently reworked, they enter the realm of painting, gradually losing their original function to acquire symbolic significance.
At the heart of Ovejero’s practice lies a form of sublimation of the ordinary, populated by mature women adorned with jewellery, carrying large handbags, wearing elaborately patterned garments, and surrounded by ornamental objects. Elegance, ostentation, and everyday life coexist within an eccentric, almost theatrical universe, where glossy surfaces and meticulous details make the image both seductive and disorienting.
In this context, kitsch becomes a point of recognition through which to explore memory, domestic intimacy, and the construction of personal identity. Excess, ornamentation, and what appears flashy or old-fashioned reactivate a shared material imagination capable of evoking personal experiences.
The exhibition unfolds through a gradual process of approaching the detail: some works present scenes in their entirety, while others isolate a single element until it becomes the focal point of the composition. The image fragments, yet each detail retains the memory of the whole, much as in the processes of recollection, which often preserve objects, surfaces, and fragments through which an entire world can be reconstructed.
Ovejero’s painting ultimately enters into dialogue with the aesthetics of “smoothness” described by South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han in Saving Beauty: a surface capable of seducing without offering resistance. Beneath the brilliance and apparent perfection of the images, time, memory, and the emotional significance of things begin to emerge. Beauty is not merely what appears, but also what appearances are capable of preserving.
COME CLOSER will open on Wednesday, 11 November, at 6:30PM at ABC-ARTE ONE OF, Via Santa Croce 21, Milan.
