Fran Baena

Fran Baena's painting work maintains a commitment to understanding contemporary reality by combining existential crisis and irony. 

His creative process involves playing with mischief in all its forms to subvert the usual codes for interpreting images, reflecting on their consumption on social media as well as the impact they have on the art world itself.

Using restrictive work methodologies, shaped by growing up in a world marked by constant economic crises and precariousness—such as using the drawing canvas of Instagram stories instead of Adobe Photoshop or other tools with a broader range—he imitates digital painting by transferring it to physical form and contrasting it with classical techniques such as egg tempera or large-scale sizes, which, due to their historical nature, have traditionally been reserved for capturing important events. In this way, painting becomes a medium to treat memes with respect, slowness, and care, progressively revealing the social issues they conceal beyond easy laughter and apparent triviality.

It is a field of study about how we have reached the point where we are surrounded by images reflecting the relationship between a frenetic life and mental health issues. Instead of warning us that they conceal a deeper problem, we systematically suffer from the generational symptom of laughter as a way to cope with the absurd.