Rafael Perez Mendoza

I'm a self-taught painter based in Spain. A little over a year ago I bought a cheap set of acrylics on a whim, started painting, and didn't stop — what began as an experiment is now a daily practice and well over a hundred works on paper and cardboard.

I work fast and small. Most of my paintings begin as a single gesture — a slash of red, a loop of green, a field of colour — and end the moment that gesture has said what it came to say. I'm drawn to the threshold between abstraction and image: a spiral that becomes an eye, strokes of blue that turn into a flock of swallows, a smear of yellow that catches fire. Weather, light, and old symbols — the Chi-Rho, Inanna, the sun — keep finding their way in.

My titles are half the work, by turns earnest and deadpan; they admit that making art is equal parts reaching for the sublime and laughing at yourself for trying.

Self-taught. Painting since 2025.