Personal Picks: Alejo P. Dualde

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: Alejo P. Dualde, our Madrid Gallery Director. With a background rooted in both visual and sonic cultures, Alejo brings a nuanced, multisensory approach to art. His personal selection is shaped by a deep sensitivity to rhythm and atmosphere, qualities that bridge his love of music with his curatorial vision. This is a look into the works that resonate with him not just visually, but emotionally and sonically.

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I have always felt that music is an essential part of my life, something that goes far beyond mere background sound. It runs through me, grounds me, inspires me. At every stage of my life, I could identify a soundtrack that defines me, as if songs were small capsules of memory and emotion. This sensitivity to sound is also reflected in the way I approach art and interpret the work of artists. Many of them find in music a parallel language that nourishes their creative process. I find it fascinating to see how different disciplines—painting, sound, composition—can intertwine to the point of becoming inseparable.

Many of our artists use music as a fundamental element in their creative process. In an organic way, music intertwines with their daily lives, creating synergies between both disciplines. In this selection, I wanted to showcase the work of four artists for whom music plays a key role, not only in their artwork but also in their lives.

My first choice is Aythamy Armas. His work focuses on the stroke and its compositional possibilities, paying close attention to the rhythm of the lines and the sound of the material on the canvas. The piece I selected captures, with a clean stroke, the rhythmic gesture of the artist creating the piece. The overlapping layers add three-dimensionality to the work, creating empty spaces that are essential from a compositional perspective, reminding me of the importance of silence in musical scores.

My second choice is the piece “Arietta semplice” by Italian artist Mirco Marchelli. With a long artistic and musical career, Mirco’s works function as silent scores, generating rhythm and movement in the viewer’s gaze. Improvisation blends with the selection of materials and objects (such as bricks, fabrics, and woods), building visual harmonies from dissonant fragments that merge into a rhythmic, melodic, and emotional whole.

For her part, artist Maru Quiñonero relates to music during the earliest stages of her creative process. The music she listens to in each moment places her in an emotional space from which she finds the colors, forms, and painting patterns for each work.
The piece “La electricidad” (part of the artist’s first institutional exhibition in her native Murcia) reflects this dialogue between color, space, and form in her work.

Finally, I selected the piece “03” by artist Hugo Alonso. His painting is closely tied to music and cinema, creating soundscapes that contextualize each piece. The dynamism in the vanishing point of his paintings makes me imagine a camera slowly approaching the scene, where the observation of these blurred landscapes evokes a soundtrack of ambient music that authentically accompanies the entirety of the work.

This selection of works seeks to view the artists’ practices from a broader perspective, where other artistic disciplines interact with each other to ultimately create concrete pictorial works. It is a transition I personally relate to as a true music lover, and one in which anyone can find common ground to connect with the work of our artists.
Alejo P. Dualde