From May 7 to June 8, Alzueta Gallery Madrid is pleased to present Había una mesa, muchas sillas, éramos pocos y murió la abuela (There Was a Table, Many Chairs, We Were Few and the Grandmother Died) by artists David Macho and Juan Narowé. The exhibition brings together two practices that, while not sharing a formal coincidence, operate according to a similar working logic: an insistent return to a limited repertoire of scenes, characters, and objects that are transformed with each repetition. Rather than constructing closed narratives, their paintings function as ongoing approaches to a personal imaginary. What emerges is not so much a stable meaning as a form of pictorial thought grounded in memory, reiteration, and excess.

Juan Narowé’s practice (Brazil, 1993) moves between drawing and painting, with frequent forays into self-publishing and graphic work. Drawing serves as the starting point and backbone of his entire production, from which multiple languages, media, and formats unfold. His images appear as densely populated scenes: chairs, tables, and surfaces covered with objects—glasses, bottles, notebooks, tools— fragments of everyday routines that expand across the canvas until every corner is filled. The disorder is deliberate and structural.

Initially trained in drawing, a medium where erasure leaves little trace, Narowé confronts painting as a radically different material and temporal condition. On canvas, nothing ever fully disappears: erasing means adding, correcting means repainting. His process unfolds as a constant back-and-forth—advancing, undoing, covering, insisting—in which error is not avoided but incorporated. Stains, overlaps, and visual noise cease to be residue and instead become essential components of the image.

His narratives incorporate subtle references to disciplines such as literature or cinema, though they usually begin with minimal elements: fragments of a dinner, a conversation, an encounter.

Ordinary remnants of shared moments that, as they accumulate, acquire an unexpected intensity. The crowded tables and multiplying chairs inevitably evoke the family restaurant that marked his childhood in Brazil. His works take shape as intimate landscapes, molded by memory and by places once inhabited and never entirely left behind. In this sense, Narowé’s universe is not only chaotic but also deeply honest. One work in particular, the only black-and-white piece in the exhibition, stands apart from the rest: in it, a figure appears at the center of the scene, surrounded by chairs and objects, establishing a more direct link to the artist and to drawing, the medium where it all began.

In the case of David Macho (Spain, 1994), intimacy is not situated in the autobiographical in the traditional sense, but rather in the way popular culture and the systems of art production permeate personal experience. His work unfolds as an investigation into the art world understood as a structure: a network of institutions, cultural policies, and markets that condition not only the artist’s trajectory but also the very form the artwork adopts. Through what he has termed bureaucratic plasticity, Macho examines how these logics shape desires, expectations, and aesthetics.

In his most recent paintings, art is addressed through widely recognizable figures—artists, cultural icons, and popular characters— that have, in one way or another, been absorbed by these structures. These references do not function as nostalgic citations, but as a language of their own through which the artist articulates his ambivalent relationship with art: a space that fascinates and exhausts him in equal measure. For Macho, art is an obsession with no clear way out, the first thought upon waking and the last before falling asleep; a closed loop in which passion and frustration coexist. In this sense, failure, far from occupying a peripheral position, lies at the very core of his practice as a structural condition of artistic making.

One of the exhibition’s canvases takes Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866) as its initial motif, although the reference becomes destabilized as the painting progresses. Far from holding up as a recognizable citation, the image shifts: echoes and remnants appear, eroding its legibility and pushing it into more unstable territory. This drift is due to an event that runs through the very process of painting: during the work’s execution, the artist’s grandmother passes away, news that deeply affects him and visibly alters the rhythm and insistence of the painting. The composition becomes progressively denser and more dissonant, and what begins as an allusion ultimately spills over into a fragmented scene where form loses coherence and gives way to nonsense. In this process, the painting seems to stage its own exhaustion: a metaphorical image of a saturated and excessive system, where the image overflows, becomes contaminated, and finally collapses. In other recent works, this same tension between the everyday, the absurd, and the abject appears as a recurring device, where humor and unease coexist without hierarchy.

The exhibition understands painting as a space of insistence. Motifs return, scenes repeat themselves, references shift and contaminate one another, never quite settling into a stable meaning. Horror vacui responds less to a fear of emptiness than to a refusal of silence. The canvas thus becomes a field of friction between memory and accumulation, where confusion does not resolve itself but remains active.