carlier | gebauer, Madrid, is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Paolo Salvador, his first with the gallery. Opening on Wednesday, 13 May, from 6 to 9 pm.

Salvador’s paintings fuse Peruvian cosmology, personal memory, and material experimentation into immersive worlds where humans, animals, and nature exist in a state of continuous becoming. Drawing on mythologies, oral traditions, ancestral histories, and the biodiversity of the Amazon and Andes, his works unfold as shifting spaces where body, landscape, spirit, and ecology remain fluid. Naked figures, spectral animals, and saturated fields of colour suggest unstable relationships between humans, animals, and symbolic forms.

Central to Salvador’s practice is a deeply tactile and intuitive approach to painting. Combining traditional painting techniques with experimental material processes, he works with clay-based pigments, natural resins, and handwoven textiles to create living surfaces shaped through rhythm, gesture, and the physicality of the materials. As Salvador explains, “Every pigment has a particular behaviour once it binds with oil. I respect the nature of each mineral and the role that it plays on the canvas.”

Born in Lima in the aftermath of political instability and accelerated globalisation in Peru, Salvador approaches painting as a process of reassembling fractured histories and hybrid
cultural realities. His work reflects on how syncretic belief systems emerge and persist within contemporary culture, transforming inherited myths and forms of perception in response
to contemporary cultural conditions.

On the occasion of the exhibition, writer and International Editor at Artforum, Pablo Larios, interviewed the artist during the preparation of the show. Their conversation will be published on the day of the opening as an introduction to Salvador’s practice and the exhibition.