“New Adventures in Hi-Fi, VOL V” takes inspiration from R.E.M.’s iconic album, a work conceived on the move—between highways, backstage rooms, and shifting landscapes. Like the record, this group exhibition understands contemporary figuration as a mobile territory, constantly being reformulated. The eleven voices gathered here propose a visual experience that oscillates between the intimate, the critical, and the enigmatic, composing a kind of emotional and conceptual “high fidelity.”

Within this terrain, Marta Leyva and Concha Martínez Barreto enter into dialogue through two distinct approaches to surrealism: Leyva creates atmospheres that dissolve the everyday into the extraordinary, while Martínez Barreto approaches memory and the spectral with subtle, almost cinematic precision. Their works operate as lucid dreams that expand perception. Nuria Valcárcel, meanwhile, delves into contemporary portraiture with a deep respect for classical tradition, producing images that breathe timelessness while opening up new emotional readings.

Ana Riaño’s series on social media introduces a reflection on the public construction of the image. By reinterpreting iconic Instagram photographs, she examines how visual identity is fabricated, styled, and replicated in the digital age—a gesture parallel to the continuous reworking of references found in R.E.M.’s album.

Léo Dorfner and Cesc Abad contribute an undercurrent of irony running through their figurative universes: Dorfner manipulates cultural symbols with near-pop precision, destabilizing their meaning through subtle humor; Abad, by contrast, employs absurdity, myth, and the animal realm to build scenes charged with critique and theatricality. In both cases, irony becomes a tool for revealing contemporary tensions through fiction.

The work of Blanca Amorós introduces a vibrant figuration of bodies and presences emerging in states of metamorphosis. Her painting, marked by chromatic intensity and decisive gesture, embodies emotion as a transformative force.

In Ethel Coppieters’ canvases, muses appear as recurring presences: figures suspended between the earthly and the introspective, sustaining an intimate narrative that acts as a poetic anchor for the exhibition.

Finally, Steffan Peters revisits landscape through atmosphere and quietude, while Juan de la Rica counters with a more luminous and humorous palette. The ceramics of Attila Kertész introduce a raw physicality, reminding us that every image ultimately arises from matter.

Thus, “New Adventures in Hi-Fi, VOL V” maps an expanded landscape of contemporary figuration: a collective journey where images—like music—become adventure, memory, and discovery.