AWL is pleased to present To See with One’s Hands, the first solo exhibition at the gallery by Lluís Lleó. Bringing together a selection of paintings and sculptural works, the exhibition explores painting as a space where memory, materiality, and transformation coexist. Moving between surface and structure, Lleó’s practice draws upon a wide historical arc—from Romanesque fresco traditions to the imaginative excesses of modern painting—while remaining grounded in the conditions of the present.
Rather than functioning as a message to be decoded, the work resists fixed interpretation. As Catalan art critic Eudald Camps describes in the exhibition text, “to create is not to communicate, but to resist,” positioning painting as an open experience rather than a closed statement. Meaning is not given in advance but emerges through the act of looking.
Lleó’s works hold a balance between autonomy and dialogue: they follow their own internal logic while remaining open to the viewer and to the histories they draw from. They carry traces of memory, but not as nostalgia. Instead, memory appears as a material presence—something layered, active, and continuously reworked.
As Eudald Camps observes, Lleó’s paintings—which at times become sculptures—are “not points of arrival but points of departure.” They open onto processes rather than conclusions, extending outward in time and space. Moving between fresco and metal, gesture and structure, they bring together different temporalities in a way that remains unresolved, yet generative.
Ultimately, To See with One’s Hands considers painting as a form of freedom: not as knowledge or message, but as an expanded field of perception in which uncertainty, imagination, and openness become central. There is no nostalgia here. Only desire and hope.