About
Memory · Identity · Time
What if much of your identity belonged to people you never knew? My work explores this inheritance through painting, family photographs, letters and the stories passed down by my grandmother Clara.
Rubén Gimeno Giner (Dénia, 2004) is a visual artist whose painting practice lies at the intersection of memory, identity and time. I understand painting not only as an act of representation, but as a poetic and conceptual means of exploring the connections between the intimate and the collective, between lived and inherited experience. My creative process begins with photographs from the family archive, both as source material and as a catalyst for a broader visual inquiry. From these images, I build compositions in which past and present coexist, and memory reveals itself through what is explicit as well as what is suggested. Figures, spaces and textures appear and disappear, overlapping in an ongoing dialogue between presence and absence, between the visible and what can only be sensed or evoked. I work mainly with oil on wood, choosing large formats that allow viewers to immerse themselves in an expanded pictorial time. The layering of pigment creates visual depth while reflecting the density of memory and the complexity of human experience: each painted layer is a fragment of suspended time, a trace of lived experience in dialogue with the imagined. My practice moves between intuition and rigorous research into images, combining spontaneous processes with considered decisions about composition, texture and colour. I want painting to go beyond representation and become a means of evocation: a space where the personal and the collective intertwine, and where the viewer’s gaze can inhabit both memory and transformation.
