Personal Picks: Paula Bernandez

Personal Picks is a new format where someone from our team selects four artworks that resonate with them on a personal level. From intimate favorites to unexpected discoveries, each selection offers an individual, behind-the-scenes glimpse into the gallery’s evolving universe—one artwork at a time.

Next up: Paula Bernández, she is the Manager of Exhibitions across all our gallery spaces, as well as overseeing logistics for our participation in international art fairs. Closely involved in the development of exhibitions, her perspective moves between the practical and the poetic. Her selection reflects a personal need to reconnect with landscape and nature, and a sensitivity to how abstraction can open spaces for reflection, memory, and inner travel.

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I have always lived in the city, but over the years I’ve felt an increasing need to be in nature—to return to the landscape and allow the horizon of my gaze to expand and stretch for kilometres.

I feel fortunate to live in a city surrounded by sea and mountains, yet the reality of everyday life rarely allows me to truly see or enjoy them as I would like. Instead, I often feel immersed in a continuous flow of buildings and cars. When I have the chance to spend a day walking through a forest, lying on the beach listening only to the waves, or observing a valley from above, I feel calm—and I return to the city with a renewed perspective.

The four works I have selected invite me to reconnect with landscape and the natural environment in different ways. What I appreciate in all of them is that the landscape is not literal; abstraction allows me to travel to different places depending on the day I look at them.

There is something about Salvia by Alba Suau that captivates me: the depth and prominence of the blue colour, the organic forms, and the small format of the painting. At times it feels like a very small fragment, almost a microscopic reading; at others, it overwhelms me to imagine myself within that place, where the scale becomes monumental.

Skámandros VI by Frédéric Dumoulin leads me toward the more spiritual dimension of nature. In Galicia, where I was born, there are many legends and stories related to mythological beings inhabiting forests, rivers, and estuaries, as well as places considered sacred—homes to ancient spirits that remind us that nature is alive and holds a kind of magic.

The chromatic landscapes (Paisatge Cromàtic) by Berni Puig offer not only a reading of space, but also of the passage of time. In his works, we see how a single place changes depending on who inhabits it, and how light or time of day alters our perception of colour. A reminder that life does not feel the same at 18:00 as it does at 19:00, even within the same day.

Finally, memories of distant travels, a house in the mountains, views from a window, or the roses and hydrangeas of a garden merge with repetition and meditative gesture in the works of María Yelletisch. Paisaje casa 2 makes me think of the landscape I always long to return to: Galicia, which for me will forever be green and blue.
Paula Bernández