Fernando Barrios Benavides at Llamazares: White and Chaos

Madrid-born artist Fernando Barrios Benavides presents 'El ojo que no perdona' at Galería Llamazares in Gijón until May 22, 2026. The exhibition features works in painting, sculpture, and drawing that incorporate construction debris—tiles, cobblestones, plaster, cement, paper—collected from vacant lots near his former studio in Madrid's Fuencarral neighborhood. These materials, often bearing traces of previous human habitation like wallpaper or acrylic paint, are integrated into his compositions as his practice shifted from psychological figuration to material abstraction. A former architecture student affected by the housing crisis, Barrios Benavides sees these found objects as natural extensions of his work, where simplified forms from earlier portraits now merge with personal artifacts and papers from his own life. The resulting pieces aim to give physical form to invisible mental states and everyday material constraints. Dominated by white expanses, the works balance refinement with chaotic elements: nooks, doodles, patterns, incisions, and layered discarded materials. The exhibition title 'The Eye That Does Not Forgive' reflects this tension between order and disorder.