“A sneaker beside a face, a kiss beside a smear. Everything keeps its temperature.”
Paint dries while the room keeps talking
Manuel García Fernández is a Spanish painter based in Oviedo, working across painting and sculpture with a process-first, gesture-driven approach.
Manuel García Fernández: On the left: Quiero ducharme contigo, 2025, 140 × 110 cm, exhibited at HAGD_Contemporary Gallery. On the right: The Crazy Bird Talk, 2024, 140 × 110 cm. Images courtesy of the artist.
In 2025 he presented Dog Bed Games at Marc Bibiloni Gallery in Madrid and exhibited new large-scale works at HAGD_Contemporary Gallery, continuing his tactile exploration of the human body, memory, and domestic space through paint.
His canvases often merge drawing, collage, and surface residue into a living texture where figures and fragments coexist, half-remembered and half-rebuilt.
The bed becomes a stage and a witness
In Dog Bed Games (2025), his tactile solo at Marc Bibiloni Gallery in Madrid, García Fernández turned intimacy into material choreography.
Curated by Javier Díaz-Guardiola, the show placed soft sculptures and paintings into shared rooms where red bodies leaned into dogs, brick walls, and each other. Beds in these works don’t comfort. They question.
Nothing is centered, but everything is charged. The figures are close, but not explained. The dog doesn’t rest. It waits.
At HAGD_Contemporary Gallery, García Fernández extended this language into wider, more chaotic compositions, letting tables, dogs, and broken household shapes drift across the canvas like overheard conversations.
The domestic became a stage for excess and tenderness, painted with the same raw precision that defines his Madrid show.
He stains first and lets figures earn entry
His process is open, even chaotic. He paints over older work, flips the canvas mid-way, draws with graphite, and allows fragments to stay if they hold.
There is no hierarchy.
Manuel García Fernández: On the left: Summer Bed, 2025, HAGD_Contemporary Gallery, 180 × 150 cm. On the right: Una conversación difícil sobre pegarse y abrazarse, 2025, 160 × 130 cm. Images courtesy of the artist.
A chunk of fabric or an unfinished edge can carry more emotion than a face. He sometimes paints from printed photos or taped references, but lets the painting make its own decisions.
Materials stay modest, mostly oil and graphite, but nothing feels tentative. His brush has better memory than most people.
Small objects argue like politics in miniature
You won’t find metaphors here. You’ll find kettles, sneakers, stripes, palms. These aren’t props. They’re cohabitants.
They appear again and again, changing position, holding mood.
A shoe sits beside a smear, not because it represents something, but because it stayed in the room. The works don’t decode. They linger.
Their logic is personal, not cryptic. One section is overpainted. Another just stops. You can almost smell the turpentine.
A blue palm keeps island weather in the picture
In 2024, during a residency at La Bibi in Mallorca, García Fernández began a series where heads became storage devices, holding motorcycles, branches, blue palms.
The palm became a motif that didn’t decorate but shifted the temperature. These works remember light, not landscape.
They act like rooms that collected too much. In Pintura para construir en tu cabeza, the residency’s resulting show, he painted not what he saw, but what stayed behind in his hands.
We leave and the red keeps breathing
Nothing in these paintings is resolved, and that’s the point.
A gesture interrupts another. A figure disappears under its own outline.
Manuel García Fernández: On the left and right: Studio view. Photos by Juan García-Mendoza. Images courtesy of the artist.
What’s left is a scene that keeps moving even when you stop looking. His work doesn’t document a memory.
It performs forgetting.
And sometimes, forgetting looks like a bed full of sneakers.
Manuel García Fernández: On the left: Un beso en la boca, 2025, 200 × 200 cm. On the right: detail of Un beso en la boca. Images courtesy of the artist.
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Author: Dominique Foertig is the founder and editor of Catapult - The New Munchies Art Club, a curatorial and editorial platform for contemporary art.
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