“Sobre aquilo que permanece invisível” | First solo show by José Manuel Ballester

About

DAN Galeria Contemporânea opens on Saturday, June 14, the exhibition On What Remains Invisible, by Spanish artist José Manuel Ballester, curated by Luiz Armando Bagolin. The show presents a selection of works from the artist’s long-standing investigation into the erasure of human figures from masterpieces of Western art history. Through these interventions, Ballester proposes a critical and sensory revision of how we view, remember, and assign meaning to images.

Ballester — recipient of the Spanish National Print Award (1999), the Goya Painting Prize of the City of Madrid (2006), and the Spanish National Photography Award (2010) — appropriates canonical works such as The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, The Birth of Venus by Botticelli, and frescoes by Giotto, digitally removing their central characters. What remains are emptied scenes, uninhabited spaces ready to be repopulated by the viewer’s memory.

By clearing the narrative field and leaving only the backgrounds — the laid tables, the forests, the architecture — Ballester’s poetics inhabit the space described by Aristotle and Borges as the interval between perception and language. The exhibition unfolds as a play between presence and absence, shifting contemplation from the allegorical subject to the surface, to what was once background or scaffolding.

In one section of the exhibition, works such as Lugar para un Nacimiento and Primavera make Botticelli’s central figures vanish, leaving only the landscape. In another, such as La Ciudad, Navidad, and El fuego, Giotto’s religious settings turn into empty cities, like paper models stripped of miracle and faith. In Jardín del Arte, Ballester reintroduces characters from various paintings into a scene by Bosch, creating a complex interplay of references and layers.

In his series Variaciones a partir de Malevich, inspired by Malevich’s Suprematism, the artist releases geometric forms from modernist utopian rigor, returning them to the realm of visual play and optical rhythm. In doing so, Ballester aligns less with idealism and more with the critical experience of our time. Combining philosophy, technology, and representation critique, On What Remains Invisible questions the very nature of the image: What do we see when the essential seems to have been removed?

José Manuel Ballester is represented by DAN Galeria Contemporânea. His work has been shown in important institutions such as Museo Reina Sofía (2005), the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome (2012), and the Frost Art Museum in Miami, and is held in major museum collections worldwide.

“In times of image saturation and symbolic erasure, Ballester’s exhibition offers a rare opportunity to think about the invisible — that which hides in plain sight.”

— Flavio Cohn

Exhibition details:
“Sobre aquilo que permanece invisível”

by José Manuel Ballester
Curated by Luiz Armando Bagolin
Opening: Saturday, June 14, 2025, at 10 AM
On view through August 14, 2025
Venue: DAN Galeria Contemporânea
Address: Rua Amauri, 73 – São Paulo
Hours: Monday to Friday, 10 AM to 7 PM; Saturdays, 10 AM to 1 PM
Free admission
More info: www.dangaleria.com.br