Nuria Valcárcel presents contemporary portraits that delve into personal and emotional memory, transforming intimate recollections into images with collective resonance. Her paintings, imbued with a delicate atmosphere, evoke universal feelings such as fragility and nostalgia, visible in the colour, light, and silent presence of her figures. Her work draws on nature, Galician folklore, which forms part of her roots, and Catalan modernism, with an affinity for the legacy of Ramón Casas, Santiago Rusiñol, and Joaquim Mir.

Valcárcel conceives each portrait as a small visual story in which the protagonists reveal just a glimpse of their identity. For the artist, everything stems from a phrase: writing germinates in a painting, and the painting, in turn, gives way to new words. ‘My texts are a natural extension of my pictorial work,’ she says. In this dialogue between image and word, Valcárcel constructs an emotional territory where intimacy becomes shared.

About O pano, Valcárcel shares, “Galician women wearing headscarves are an icon of rural culture. This garment was tied in different ways depending on marital status and was used both in farm work and in everyday life. I remember my grandmothers wearing headscarves, in their later years in strict black, as a symbol of mourning.

In this painting, there is a new element in my pictorial language, which is the texture in the background. This texture is related to the passage of time and the peeling walls of my grandparents’ farmhouses.”