CAN ART Fair 2026 - Before Words
Before Words brings together the work of Malvina Kang Hughes and Jesús de Miguel, two artists based in Ibiza whose practices, while distinct, are united by a shared understanding of painting as a form of inquiry rather than representation.
For both artists, painting is not a means of illustrating reality but of accessing forms of knowledge that exist before language or explanation. Their works emerge through intuition, gesture, material exploration, and sustained attention to the act of making itself. Rather than presenting fixed ideas, they create spaces where meaning remains fluid, open, and continually evolving.
At the heart of both practices is a profound engagement with materiality.
Working with mineral pigments, layered surfaces, and an intuitive process rooted in meditation and emotional perception, Malvina Kang Hughes creates paintings that function as interior landscapes. Her works occupy the space between memory and sensation, inviting a slower form of looking in which subtle shifts of colour, texture, and light gradually reveal themselves over time. The paintings do not seek to describe experience, but to evoke its emotional residue.
Jesús de Miguel approaches painting through immediacy, instinct, and physical engagement. Gesture, mark-making, and material experimentation become vehicles for discovery rather than control. His works embrace unpredictability, allowing accident, resistance, and transformation to remain visible within the finished composition. Each painting records an encounter between artist and material, where meaning emerges through process rather than intention.
Together, these practices suggest that abstraction is not an escape from the world, but another way of understanding it.
The exhibition unfolds as a series of unseen landscapes—territories of memory, perception, emotion, and becoming. Neither entirely internal nor external, these works inhabit the shifting space between the two. They ask not to be decoded or explained, but to be experienced, inviting viewers to encounter forms of understanding that exist before words.encounter forms of understanding that exist before language begins.
