Alberto Marquez Paints the Mediterranean in Layers

Alberto Marquez’s paintings build the Mediterranean coast out of layers: collaged paper, loose pencil line, and mixed media color laid one over another until a beach, a table, or a childhood memory comes into focus. Working out of the Alicante region on Spain’s Costa Blanca, he has spent three decades moving between figuration and abstraction, and the fifteen paintings currently in Jaloe Art Gallery’s collection track that movement in real time, from a beach at the height of July to a bench held by a grandfather’s hand.

In Mediterranean Summer III (2026), a hot pink lounge chair anchors a stretch of sand while yellow and green striped umbrellas march toward the tideline and a small sailboat drifts across the bay behind them. Marquez sets precise linework against looser passages of collage and wash, so the beach feels mapped out and caught on the fly at the same time: the kind of coastal afternoon that asks nothing beyond watching the light change over the water.

Marquez has been exhibiting since 1992, and his paintings reward a slow, close look: figuration and abstraction share the same surface without either one fully winning out. Jaloe Art Gallery now holds the largest concentration of his artwork on the market: fifteen paintings dated between 2023 and 2026, ranging from wide coastal scenes to close studies of fruit on a table, all built in mixed media on either canvas or wood panel.

Two workshops, one education

Marquez trained at the Escuela de Artes de Orihuela between 1990 and 1996, the years that laid the foundation of his practice. A PETRA exchange took him to the École Nationale d’Arts Décoratifs in Limoges in 1993, where he worked in two workshops at once: the enamel studio run by M. Redon and the painting studio run by M. Haramburu. Enamel is an unusual training ground for a painter: its color must be planned before the piece goes into the kiln, and something of that discipline seems to carry into how deliberately Marquez still builds a surface.

Back in Orihuela, he spent seven years, from 1997 to 2004, in Federico Chico’s painting workshop. That long apprenticeship shows in the confidence of the later paintings, where even the thinnest passages of paint read as deliberate. Marquez began showing in 1992, first around Alicante and Murcia, then at the Palais Jacques Coeur in Limoges, at the Sala-Museo San Juan de Dios in Orihuela, at Unicaja in Almería, and across three solo exhibitions at Galería Juan de Juanes in Alicante, in 2000, 2002, and 2004.

How the paintings are built

Every painting in the collection begins the same way: collaged paper goes down first, then pencil, then color, and the three elements never fully resolve into one another. In Mediterranean Summer II (2026), the foreground takes shape out of collaged paper, loose pencil lines, and unrestrained splashes of orange and green, and a half-buried boat emerges from marks that stay raw, never smoothed into place. The result reads like a memory of a beach more than a photograph of one, compressed onto a wood panel that measures 100 by 120 centimeters.

A fourth painting in the same series, Mediterranean Summer IV, completes the suite by trading the brightest hour of the day for a hazier, late-afternoon register. Seen together, the three Mediterranean Summer paintings share a repeating vocabulary: striped umbrellas, a low horizon line, and a palette that swings from ochre and lime through hot pink to a deep, glassy teal, the same stretch of coastline treated as a subject with more than one mood in it.

The support changes with the subject. Canvas bookends the collection, carrying both the earliest coastal scenes and the newest interior ones, while wood panel holds the middle years: the four table paintings from 2025 and the Mediterranean Summer trio from 2026. It is a small, practical decision that tracks a larger one, since the panel absorbs the heaviest collage without warping the way canvas can.

From the beach to the table

Sometimes Marquez paints wide: a whole beach, a whole bay, figures reduced to gesture and shadow along the tideline. Other times he closes in on a single object and holds it there. Domingos de Playa and Family Time, both dated 2024 and both painted in mixed media on canvas at 150 x 100 cm, belong to the gallery’s earliest holdings of his artwork and set the coastal vocabulary the later series would return to.

The following year turned that same hand toward the table. Un Limón Medio Limón (2025) captures the quiet freshness of a tabletop scene bathed in warm daylight, its lemons rendered in vibrant yellow against softer surrounding hues, the light suggestive of midday drifting toward afternoon. Noches de verano, painted the same year, moves the same patient hand into evening, using soft shadows and delicate highlights to suggest the lingering light of a summer night around the table. Two further still lifes from 2025 keep the same habit of attention: in Me gusta la fruta roja, deep reds become the visual focus against softer surrounding hues, and in Café y más, quiet contrasts of light and shadow suggest a relaxed pause gathered around the table. Between the four of them, an ordinary lemon or a coffee cup gets the same patient study as a stretch of beach.

New rooms, familiar hand

The two most recent additions to the collection, both completed this year, move the vocabulary somewhere Marquez had not taken it before: indoors, and into memory instead of observation. Childhood memories at the park with Grandpa holds onto only a few specific details, warm light, a bench, a hand held loosely, while the rest of the scene stays soft, built in the same layered collage, loose pencil, and unhurried color that defines his coastal paintings. We’re going out for tapas tonight trades beach umbrellas for lamplight, an evening just getting started instead of an afternoon already underway.

Marquez has shown at several of Jaloe’s own events over the past two years, from Golf & Art and Art & Cocktail to this year’s Art & Wine. His newest paintings suggest a collection still finding new rooms to work in. The Mediterranean remains the subject. Where in the room it happens is what has started to change.