Biography
Carlos Peñalver (Alicante, 1988). An ultra-local, inventive, and multidimensional artist. Sometimes described as an activist or performance artist. He draws very quickly to create very slow works.
Very generous isometric drawings. They reveal more information than reality gives us.
So that by following the lines, you can read his movements. The speed. That time is drawn.
Influenced by Junya Ishigami's almost invisible pencil drawings, in the Japanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2008.
His work is very intimate. It draws the viewer closer to his world. To stay there.
Almost obsessed with a continuous, loose, very open line, difficult to read, and impossible to steal, he simultaneously wants to tell his story in detail and the times in which he lived.
His drawings always unite two works, one abstract and imperceptible in the distance, and another very defined in the proximity. Like in our minds, when we choose what we want to see.
Recently, more focused on memory, his work creates broad spatiotemporal maps, landscapes where the everyday reality of characters is mixed with their ideas, their memories, as well as leaps in space-time with references to elements from other eras.
From the inside out. Drawing the forgotten, drawing elements from memory, detached from rigor, almost as if the hand and mind had separated and taken their own paths.
He seeks his work to be understood as 'drawn ideas'.
Received an Honorable Mention and a score of 10/10 from Ai WeiWei in the 2014 Beijing Cityvision Competition. 'Temple 01', a house for a Chinese citizen measuring 0.5 square meters.
Selling his drawings on the streets of London in 2015, architect Richard Tan offered him an artist residency and his first solo exhibition in Kuala Lumpur in 2016.
These projects led to his representation in London by the international agency Artiq.
He developed permanent murals pieces for institutions such as the London School of Economics by Richard Rogers, Brookfield Properties, Saatchi Gallery, Huntsman in Savile Raw, Montcalm, the Crypt of St. Botolph's in Aldgate for the Renaissance Foundation, AMP Capital in Berkeley Square or the iconic Citypoint with Santiago Calatrava's dome.
His works began to be included in private collections, such as the Hilton Headquarters, Addleshaw Goddard, Ambassadors Bloomsbury Hotel or the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, among many others. As well as public projects for London Borough of Newham, London Heritage Quarter with a sculpture in Westminster Cathedral Piazza or Arts Council England in East Quay.
In 2024, his first personal collection, 'Mind Maps' will take him to New York, where he will be represented in the US for the first time, exhibiting at fairs such as the Metropolitan Pavilion in NY, Art Miami, Art Palm Beach in Florida, Madrid, KunstRAI in Amsterdam, as well as the historic Galería Miguel Marcos in Barcelona.
In his quest to represent the human mind, this series, in turn, became his own drawn chronology.