Performed Painting looks at the act and re-enactment of painting - directly on the gallery wall or abstracted into the realm of video or film. Physical and visual limits are probed and tools or technologies deployed to extend the artist’s reach, expand the extent of a brushstroke or re-present the colour spectrum visible to the human eye. The image may resemble a movement-map for the eye to wander over and revisit, trailing the artist’s hand. This is action painting - or an idea of action painting – we can no longer be certain.

Alan Sastre uses the conventions of painting to challenge the limits of visual representation, using perspective to create an analytical maze which blurs the distinction between imagination and reality. Through the working and reworking of the paint, the canvas becomes an ambiguous space, both painting and sculpture, breaching the barrier between picture plane and spatial illusion. This paradox creates an ambiguity that challenges our habitual way of reading images; while some answers are produced, new uncertainties are also raised.

As a dancer, Vicky Uslé is interested in the interactions between dance and painting. Continuously investigating the analogies between the blank canvas and the empty stage, her brushstrokes are the result of spontaneous movements where the hazardous plays a key role. Architecture is another incentive in her paintings. Are they plans for forgotten buildings? Ephymeral burrows built by industrious animals? A synaesthesia-like mapping of an internal geography? Fantasy is essential here, both abstract and distinctly architectural. The images are places to see in to and out from, drawing you in through the surface of the paint, which folds and unfolds, creating entirely new parameters, organic and lucid, often so diffused that it moves just beyond the reach of the viewer.

While Vicky Uslé compares the forms she creates on the pictorial surface with the movements of a dancer on the stage, Rosana Antolí's practice incorporates both painting and dance. For this exhibition, Antolí will perform her critical and deconstructive response to Yves Klein’s work Antrophometries, where female bodies covered in blue were manipulated, like human brushes, to represent the medium and subject of the art work, as well as being the object for the male gaze. In Antoli’s act, however, a female dancer with a “real body” is in control, performing a ritualistic dance which addresses female empowering and re-enactment of primitive forms of movement. Her highly physical and improvised movements will be imprinted, also in blue paint, on the gallery’s floor and walls, and will spill out into the street, where a group of volunteers, summoned by the artist through the social media, will join in as a gesture in favour of the democratisation of art.

The materiality of painting in the work of Ferran Gisbert eludes language and meaning to re-claim the creative process of painting as a pure form of expression and performative intervention. Form is generated by the action of painting. Employing a handmade paintbrush corresponding to the artist's own hight, the performative act is imprinted directly on the gallery walls, registering the movements of the artist, full of gesture, speed and vitality.

This exhibition has been curated with and supported by SCAN (Spanish Contemporary Art Network)