How we observe and understand our surroundings directly affects how we experience things emotionally.There are several heavy-hitting theories across physics, philosophy, and cognitive science that suggest our sensory processing is highly subjective and flimsy. Once translated into the sphere of painting, particularly in works where the canvas is a physical medium that can be stained, sullied, and scarred, things become increasingly complex, visceral, and real. And it’s within this uncertainty that Jan Vallverdu confronts the concept of a “precious” and “finished” image, treating the painting as a site of physical and psychological conflict. By building and undoing, creating and destroying, he is intentionally sabotaging his process and prior intention, trampling himself into a Misstep.
So, while our reality is mostly built from purposeful, meaningful elements that can be easily recognized and contextualised, the Barcelona-based artist is more interested in what happens when such elements fall apart, dissolve, or are merely suggested. And to explore it, his methods rely heavily on intuition and trust, grounded in his progressive experience in those muddy terrains: intuition for making decisions without a fully resolved strategy, and trust that his process and materials will eventually settle into a form that feels convincing and worthwhile. The process begins with
raw charcoal drawings, where violent gestures coalesce into a skeleton or a dense diagrammatic mass. Even as nearby elements destabilize the composition, the central figure remains standing, navigating the work toward a fragile state Vallverdu describes as the ‘balance of aesthetics’. This synthesis of abstract composition, gesture, and surface uses the protagonist as an excuse, a starting point, and a sensory anchor.
In this new series, Vallverdu begins by establishing a calm, humming background tone. Using more subdued and complementary hues, he creates gradients and voids, which are then disrupted by fiery, pseudo-geometrical abstract structures. Beneath this frenzy of mark-making, a body emerges as an axis of sorts. Offsetting its original weight and recoding its position and appearance, the lines, marks, and gestures pierce through, collapse, or compress it against its surroundings.
Through constant experimentation, Vallverdu’s methods allow every step of the process to slip and have a say about the next decision. Within the state of uncertainty from which the work arises, the constructed visuals carry an almost palpable tension, almost pushing the figure toward failure. The tension extends from visual elements to modes of depiction and the colors and surfaces resting on the canvas’s ground. Together, they construct an unstable environment in which these visuals exist, pushing them further away from the realm of relatable depiction. The painting becomes its own logic system that holds coded ideas of an entanglement of body or self within its surroundings. With destructive lines and marks disrupting the ample breathing space of such a backdrop, these paintings can be read as a visual metaphor for life and its circumstances.
Both a painting for a painting’s sake and a litmus test for navigating creative discomfort, these works refuse automatic recognition and immediate reading. Instead, they impose patience and confrontation, rewarding the viewer with the transformation of seemingly cryptic, fractured, and abstract visual data into charged pictorial cues. By frequently self-sabotaging his process and destroying what’s been built up, Vallverdu makes each painting a record of a journey marked by a series of steps and Missteps.

Saša Bogojev