Bernabé Gilabert

Baseboards and the boundaries between floors and walls provide him with a vocabulary of lines, proportions and fields of color. Drawing on these everyday elements, he fragments and reconstructs the image into an independent pictorial structure. Domestic space becomes legible through clues: a band of color, an interruption or the relationship between two planes can suggest a room without describing it in full.

His practice combines painting and collage on canvas, paper and wood. The differing qualities of these supports contribute to the image, from the continuity of a painted surface to the joining of fragments and modules. Works in the Collage and Masking series continue this investigation, while works on paper explore the tension between edges, layering and color on a different scale.

In Des-habitados, traces of interiors exposed when a building disappears become a starting point for painting. This attention to what remains after an absence also shapes Arqueología íntima, presented in Valdepeñas in 2024–2025. The exhibition brought together paintings, photographs and materials referring to walls and studio processes, connecting the construction of the work with an examination of remnants and the passage of time.

His exhibition history includes Escuela de Arte La Palma in Madrid, Museo Municipal de Valdepeñas, Museo Antonio López Torres in Tomelloso and Centro Sociocultural Joan Miró in Móstoles. In 2010 he presented La huella en el espacio at the Torreón de Lozoya in Segovia. More recently, Museo Municipal López-Villaseñor in Ciudad Real hosted Deshabitados. La huella del vacío in 2023; in 2026 he participated in ArteSantander with Marquesa Gallery.

In 2022, Des-habitados received the Diputación Provincial de Ciudad Real acquisition-fund award at the 83rd Exposición Internacional de Artes Plásticas de Valdepeñas. The city awarded him its Gregorio Prieto Fine Arts Medal in 2023. The following year, his transfer of the mixed-media work Interior to the town council added it to the municipal painting collection, strengthening the artist’s connection with his birthplace.