Matiz Gallery hosts BASPcr Mesa II – Encuentro Material exhibition exploring vernacular materiality

Matiz Gallery in Barcelona presents BASPcr Mesa II – Encuentro Material, a collective exhibition featuring artists whose practices engage with materials possessing deep artisanal and vernacular connections. The show includes works by Adam Weismann (Claymoon), Alexandre Clanis, Alberto Ruiz Villar, and Jordi Artigas, each approaching materiality from distinct perspectives. Weismann's unfired clay panels are constructed through compression and layering techniques, preserving visible traces of their making process. Artigas develops works where gesture activates the pictorial plane, while Clanis explores repetition and large-scale formats on industrial supports. Ruiz Villar creates stratified compositions where the layering of acrylic and plaster becomes the composition itself. The exhibition highlights materials like unfired clay, coffee transformed into pigment through slow decantation, plaster, and alabaster—materials that demand presence and contain knowledge about pre-industrial making processes. This material-focused abstraction emerges as slow, hand-marked, and rooted in natural world echoes rather than intellectual distance. The exhibition runs until June 21, 2026, coinciding with Barcelona's renewed engagement with its material traditions, from hand-placed modernist street mosaics to emerging vernacular architectures. Encuentro Material enters this conversation from within contemporary abstraction, questioning what happens when vernacular knowledge becomes painting.