COME CLOSER: Antonio Ovejero

Come Closer stems from the need to pause and focus on what usually remains at the margins of the social imagination: a constellation of references, symbols, complexities, tensions, meanings and values that emerge precisely where luxury reveals its darker side, in the forms of decoration, superfluity and excess.

It is an invitation to approach the scene slowly, to pause before the image and observe it for longer, until we discover that what seemed secondary can become the undisputed centre of the representation.

Antonio Ovejero (Valencia, 1999) pursues a figurative painting practice centred on the relationship between memory, identity and material culture. His paintings stem from an imaginary rooted in the domestic sphere, particularly the feminine one, bringing porcelain, jewellery, textiles, flowers, decorative motifs, accessories and furnishing objects to the fore. These become the protagonists of theatrical, sumptuous and highly visual compositions. Painting thus transforms elements of everyday life into sensitive vehicles of memory, suspended between reality, ornament and mise en scène.

The images often originate in the collection and theatrical restaging of objects belonging to the personal sphere or found in markets, shops and ordinary spaces of everyday life. Ovejero photographs, rearranges and reworks them before transferring them onto the painted surface. In the transition from reality to painting, these elements gradually lose their original function and acquire a new symbolic dimension: they become traces, evocations and fragments of a personal story that is also inscribed within a broader, shared memory.

At the heart of his practice lies a form of sublimation of the ordinary, bringing to life a universe populated by mature women adorned with jewellery, large handbags, elaborately patterned clothes, carefully styled hair and objects with a strong ornamental presence. An eccentric stage emerges, where elegance, ostentation and an unusual routine coexist. Through gleaming surfaces, meticulous details and reflections, the act of painting intensifies their presence, emphasising the tactile and decorative dimension of the image and making it increasingly seductive.

In this universe, everything converges in kitsch, which is not merely an aesthetic category but becomes a point of recognition. Excess, frills, brilliance and whatever appears showy, pretentious or even outdated become tools through which to explore memory and a particular way of shaping one’s home, intimacy and sense of self. These forms belong to a shared material universe and, precisely because they are familiar, can reactivate personal experiences even when they are not directly our own.

Ovejero’s visual language thus enters into dialogue with what the South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in Saving Beauty (2018), identifies as the aesthetics of “smoothness”, one of the defining features of our time: a surface capable of seducing without wounding or offering resistance. The gleam of the porcelain, jewellery, textiles and objects depicted by Ovejero seems to inhabit this very tension. His images attract through formal perfection and ornamental richness, yet beneath their apparent flawlessness emerge time, memory and the emotional character of things. Beauty, then, is not only what appears, but also what appearance is capable of preserving.

Come Closer develops through a series of approaches and a gradual narrowing of the field of vision. Some works offer a broader view, as though the viewer were standing before the scene in its entirety or even becoming part of it. Others progressively narrow the gaze, isolating an element, a surface, a motif or an object. What initially belongs to the whole thus comes to occupy the entire image. In this way, the detail ceases to be secondary and takes centre stage.

In this sense, moving closer also means losing sight of the whole. The image fragments, the scene dissolves, and what remains is a detail that nevertheless holds the memory of the whole.

Antonio Ovejero’s painting moves precisely within this suspended space between what we see, what we remember and what we imagine. Photography serves as an intermediate stage, while the painterly gesture alters, intensifies and reconstructs reality, transforming the object into an image and the image into memory. The result is a visual universe in which the domestic becomes theatrical, ornament takes on an almost monumental dimension, and detail becomes the site of an especially evocative narrative.

Come Closer therefore invites viewers to slow down. To look again at what they believe they know. To move closer until an ordinary object no longer appears merely as itself, but as a fragment of a story that moves, with ostentatious ease, through the different stages of life.

EPerhaps it is precisely in the detail, at the point where the gaze is compelled to pause, that the richest of multitudes lies hidden: the story of each one of us.