Madrid,
Last October marked a decade since Rubén Martín de Lucas, at the beginning of his solo career after being part of the Boa Mistura collective, displayed his minimal republics.
It addressed the options of generating and inhabiting a space creatively, that is, of intervening in a landscape and relating to it: a constant in its production has been the reflection on the ties between the individual and the territory and the questioning of our feeling of ownership towards the places we inhabit and of some of the physical and mental barriers with which we sometimes limit the surfaces within our reach. doors to the field.
For all the works that were part of that exhibition, whose anniversary APGallery has commemorated with the screening of a short documentary by Fernando Borlán, Martín de Lucas carried out the same exercise: that of appropriating one hundred square meters, drawing a border and inhabiting that place, which has become an ephemeral microstate, for a period of less than twenty-four hours. The exhibition included overhead photographs and videos, taken with a drone, that captured or narrated these interventions, which the artist referred to as gestures that defend life above any flag, any nation.
In his new exhibition at the Marquesa Gallery in Carabanchel, Martín de Lucas has focused on another type of self-imposed barriers: those that we establish between the civilized (domesticated) and the wild and the reflection of these dichotomies in our way of relating to nature and its species.
This new proposal is called “Taming and Dying”, its approach oscillates between irony and poetry and consists of oil paintings on canvas and mixed media works on paper in which this Madrid author, an engineer by training, warns of the possibility of a future as juicy and attractive as it is sterileof the consequences of our attraction to atomic power and our desire to control, for the use of resources or leisure, an increasingly greater extension of available (wild) land.
Fish tanks, cages, multi-eyed fish and chickens that end their days in buckets of KFC They populate works in which he once again makes abundant use of words and those increasingly rare empty spaces outside of the canvases. Also unthreatening bad wolves, with sharp teeth, before those who force us to tremble.
Rubén Martín de Lucas. “Tame or die”
MARQUESA GALLERY
C/ Marquesa de Argüeso, 38
Madrid
From November 21, 2025
