SWAB BARCELONA 2025
SC GALLERY / STAND 06 / JULIA SANTA OLALLA + PABLO MERCHANTE 02–05 OCT
SC Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in SWAB 2025, presenting works by Julia Santa Olalla (Granada, 1985) and Pablo Merchante (Huelva, 1982).
Both artists have consolidated their careers on the international circuit through exhibitions across Europe and Latin America. For this edition of SWAB, they present a selection of their most recent works.
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There is the notion of matter as a mere inert object. In today’s society, shaped by economic logic, we tend to establish a hierarchical relationship between subject and object, where the subject possesses and the object is possessed, used, and accumulated.
This binary scheme has reduced our view of the material to that of “things with owners” circulating within the same system, stripped of agency and relegated to the most basic utility.
There also exist ritual or spiritual contexts in which objects acquire a symbolic quality. They become vessels, mediating nexuses with that which escapes mundane experience and transcends.
In both cases—the economic and the sacred—we remain trapped in a dual form of categorizing our world, in which things can only be “alive” or “non-living,” “profane” or “sacred.”
Yet this structuring of reality responds to the way we, as a society, are able to organize ourselves, but not to the way we, as individuals, are capable of relating. Humans encounter the non-human through other possibilities: to think of matter as something entangled with us, with its own voice, capable of generating microstructures within everyday experience. In this context, the works of Pablo Merchante and Julia Santa Olaya propose a more human approach to objecthood. A careful attempt to uncover the silent poetics of the commonplace, where the trivial, the sparse, the inconsequential become the object of attention. In the motifs of their paintings, one perceives a shared perceptual and intuitive logic, where both reimagine the everyday and suggest a horizontal relationship with the material as an active part of life, memory, and emotion. In their paintings, objects speak of them as much as they speak of the objects.
In both painters there is a deliberate pause upon the familiar, driven by the whim of simple pleasure, in which the boundary between subject and object dissolves: a head becomes a pictorial motif with the same intensity as a vase or a ceramic swan become protagonists.
There is no interest in faithfully representing “how things are,” nor is there a particular subject to be addressed. Yet there is a narrative. Figuration is traversed by the abstract and the intangible. The figure of the hero blurs, and the story becomes more human—a search to reveal the energy of the insignificant. The character acquires a material presence, the inanimate becomes activated, charged with agency. The sensation of mystery opens the space to the conundrum of the everyday.
“I found that I liked noises even more than I liked intervals. I liked noises just as much as I had liked single sounds.” John Cage; Lecture on Nothing
”Conundrum of the Everyday” by Andrea Hernández Sanz
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For more information, contact: scgallery@scgallery.es
SC Gallery is participating in SWAB 2025 with the collaboration and support of the Provincial Council of Bizkaia (Bizkaiko Foru Aldundia).
SWAB.
Address: Textile Pavilion. Fira de Barcelona, Avinguda Rius i Taulet, 10, 08004 Barcelona.
+ Info: https://swab.es/es/
