

Malvina Kang Huges & Jean Willi

For both Hughes and Willi, blue is more than a colour. It is a state of mind, a threshold between the visible and the invisible, where their artwork emerges from. This resonance of blue, at once meditative and expansive, becomes a key to the artists’ practice, a way of entering into the most profound layers of experience and experimentation, their works coming ‘out of the blue.’

Both working surrounded by the Island’s nature, in Ibiza, suspended between sea and sky, both made of endless blue, from which these paintings emerge.

For Jean Willi, painting grew from calligraphic beginnings into abstractions that invite freedom, for artist and viewer alike. Colour, chosen intuitively, becomes a reflection of mood and moment, opening space for interpretation without prescription. “I love to leave it up to the viewer,” he notes, trusting the painting itself to carry meaning. His decades in Ibiza, lived largely in the island’s North, have cultivated an artistic language that is recognisable yet untethered, rooted in honesty and attentive to the unknown.

For Malvina Hughes, painting is a practice of presence, a daily act of returning.She carries rhythm, stillness, and poetry into her canvases, approaching each work as an arrival from silence. “I like to get myself out of the road for the painting to arrive,” she explains, allowing the canvas to lead the way. Her process is guided as much by meditation as by gesture, an exploration of the unspoken, where colours, lines, and forms emerge like visions surfacing from within.

Together, Willi and Hughes share a devotion to painting as a vessel of the ineffable. Their works arise not from premeditated design but from surrender: to intuition, to the island’s light, to the blue that holds them. If Willi approaches abstraction as an open field for recognition, Hughes encounters it as a diary of stillness and transformation. Both, however, leave space for the viewer, for the mysterious play between what is given and what is found.

In Ibiza, between the Mediterranean’s endless horizon and the sky’s infinite expanse, these paintings appear as though they had always been there: surfacing out of the blue.