Manel Alba

Manel is not one artist. It is the project of two, Alejandro Tomas and Alex Calatayud, who started working together to learn from each other and ended up building a language neither of them had on their own.

They did not merge their styles. They built something new, layer by layer, in their shared studio in Valencia, starting from texture, light and silence. Those first pieces have since become a controlled visual dialogue in which every mark and every empty area is doing a job.

They work in mixed media, combining acrylic, oil, charcoal, ink and natural pigment. The process moves between the intuitive and the exact, a spontaneous gesture on one layer and high precision on the next, applied thinly so that texture, transparency and depth build up gradually.

Negative space is central to how they think. For Manel it is not absence but presence, the part of the painting where the emotion has room to breathe and where you are invited to stop and look. These are works made to be lived with.