Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: it is time to talk seriously about Rafa Macarrón, this 44-year-old man who, from his Madrid studio facing the hills of El Pardo, is upsetting our understanding of contemporary painting with an audacity that would make the most daring among us pale. Far from the beaten paths of academia, this physiotherapist turned self-taught painter offers us a pictorial universe of unprecedented richness, populated by slender creatures with limbs stretched like children’s dreams, bathed in surreal landscapes with saturated colors.
Macarrón’s work thrives on this constant tension between the rigorous anatomy he perfectly masters thanks to his medical training and the expressive deformation he imposes on his characters. These hybrid figures, with deformed faces and filiform extremities, evolve in compositions that oscillate between solitary portraits of striking melancholy and teeming panoramas where dozens of protagonists seem to participate simultaneously in multiple scenes of daily life. This constant duality between solitude and community, between anatomical precision and creative distortion, constitutes one of the major strengths of his work.
The Heritage of Confessions: A Pictorial Spirituality
Rafa Macarrón’s universe draws deeply from the mystical literary tradition, notably from the Confessions of Saint Augustine [1], a foundational text that the artist claims as mandatory reading and a major source of inspiration. This filiation is not trivial, as it reveals an approach to creation that far exceeds the simple pictorial act to elevate itself towards an authentic spiritual quest. Just as Augustine scrutinized the meanders of his soul to discern the traces of the divine, Macarrón explores the nooks of the human condition through his deformed but touching characters.
The confessional dimension of his art manifests itself in this unique ability to transform the observation of the everyday into a profound meditation on existence. His creatures, born of his imagination but nourished by his personal experience, carry within them this Augustinian introspection that seeks to grasp the essence of being beyond appearances. The Madrid artist shares with the Bishop of Hippo this conviction that truth is revealed in the meticulous examination of oneself and one’s relationship to the world. Thus, when Macarrón paints directly on the canvas, without preparatory sketch, in a spontaneous momentum that he himself compares to a state of creative trance, he reproduces this Augustinian approach of confident abandonment to a superior force that guides the hand and the spirit.
This mystical dimension of his work is reflected in his meditative practice of painting, inherited from his years of professional cycling where he already discovered this connection with the absolute spoken of by the great mystics. His readings of philosophy, poetry and mystical literature directly nourish his creation, allowing him to reach this state of detachment necessary for absolute creative freedom. Macarrón’s characters, with their tenderness despite their deformations, embody this Augustinian vision of humanity: imperfect but redeemed by love, grotesque but sublimated by grace.
The spontaneity of his painterly gesture, this ability to paint for eight or ten hours straight without perceiving the passage of time, directly evokes the mystical experience of temporal ecstasy described by Augustine. In this communion with the creative act, Macarrón joins the tradition of spiritual artists who see in their art a means of dialogue with the divine. His canvases thus become true pictorial confessions, testimonies of a soul seeking meaning and beauty in an often chaotic world. This confessional approach also explains why his works touch the viewer so deeply: they bear within them the authenticity of sincere confession, the naked truth of man face to face with himself and his existential questions.
The Architectural Space of the Soul
The influence of architecture on the work of Rafa Macarrón cannot be underestimated, as it fundamentally structures his artistic vision and his understanding of pictorial space. The son of architects, the artist grew up in an environment where spatial design and the mastery of volumes were part of the family’s daily life. This early training is now reflected in a unique approach to composition, where each element finds its place according to a rigorous architectural logic, even in the apparent chaos of his densest panoramas.
Macarrón’s workshop itself, described as a balanced world where everything seems to be exactly where it should be, reveals this deep architectural sensitivity. This space, which must be entered through a door-painting to access a different universe, functions as a metaphor for his creative approach: art as an architecture of the imagination, the patient construction of an alternative world governed by its own spatial laws. The travels of his childhood with his architect parents, these pilgrimages through art fairs and museums around the world, nourished his understanding of space as a place of aesthetic revelation.
This architectural training is particularly evident in his handling of the relationships between two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality. His characters with elongated limbs seem to want to extract themselves from the pictorial surface, creating that characteristic spatial tension that brings the viewer closer to the represented universe. This manipulation of perspective and volumes reveals an architectural mastery of space that goes far beyond mere pictorial representation. Macarrón literally constructs his compositions like an architect erecting a building, thinking about the circulation of the gaze, the vanishing points, the volumes and the voids.
His flat backgrounds, far from being a stylistic facility, are part of this architectural logic: they create a neutral space that allows the figures to deploy their sculptural presence. This economy of means reveals a deep understanding of the relationships between figure and architecture, between inhabitant and habitat. His characters move in stripped-down spaces that sometimes evoke elevator interiors or waiting rooms, those non-places of modern architecture where humanity is revealed in its fundamental solitude.
His innovative use of industrial materials such as aluminum and PVC also testifies to this contemporary architectural sensitivity. These supports, usually reserved for construction, become surfaces of artistic expression under his brush, creating an unprecedented dialogue between art and architecture. This transgression of material boundaries is part of a modern architectural approach that rejects the traditional hierarchy of noble and vulgar materials.
His recent sculptures, notably his bronze dogs, confirm this evolution towards an architectural practice of art. These three-dimensional works with which the viewer can interact transform the exhibition space into a true architecture of aesthetic experience. Macarrón no longer confines himself to painting space, he sculpts it, shapes it, inhabits it. This natural progression from painting to sculpture reveals an architectural logic that was already present in his early canvases.
Matter and Spirit: A Contemporary Alchemy
The technical richness of Rafa Macarrón deserves to be examined in detail as it reveals a truly revolutionary approach to artistic creation. His arsenal of materials, acrylic, gouache, oil, pencils, markers, aerosols, aluminum, PVC, testifies to a total freedom from academic conventions. This diversity is not gratuitous: each material corresponds to a particular state of mind, to a specific expressive necessity that enriches the emotional palette of the work.
Aerosol brings modernity and dynamism, pencils and markers create the framework and textures, waxes, acrylics and gouaches offer nuanced transparencies, while oil makes the whole more complex. This polymorphic approach reveals an artist who refuses limitations, a creator who draws from all technical registers to serve his vision. His canvases thus become true laboratories of experimentation where secular traditions and contemporary innovations merge.
The spontaneity of his gesture, this ability to paint directly on the canvas without preparatory sketch, is paradoxically based on an absolute technical mastery. Macarrón can afford this apparent freedom because he perfectly possesses his craft, because his years of training in anatomy have given him an intimate knowledge of the bodily structure that he can then deform with full knowledge of the causes. This dialectic between control and letting go constitutes one of the most fascinating aspects of his work.
Transfigured Humanity
Macarrón’s characters inhabit a world that is both familiar and strange, everyday and fantastic. These creatures with impossible proportions, bulging eyes, and elongated limbs carry within them all the complexity of the contemporary human condition. They evoke our loneliness in large urban centers, our difficulty in communicating despite physical proximity, our quest for meaning in an increasingly mechanized world.
But far from falling into easy pessimism, Macarrón instills in his creations an infinite tenderness that redeems all the deformities. His characters, despite their sometimes disturbing aspects, exude a deep humanity that touches us directly. This ability to reveal beauty in deformation, grace in imperfection, places the artist in the lineage of the great masters who have been able to transform raw reality into poetic vision.
The influence of Picasso, claimed by the artist since his childhood visit to the Parisian museum, is felt in this freedom taken with traditional anatomical representation. But where the master of Malaga revolutionized painting through cubist geometricization, Macarrón offers a different path: that of tender expressionism, of empathetic deformation that reveals the soul rather than dissecting it.
Well-Deserved International Recognition
The journey of Rafa Macarrón commands admiration for its speed and coherence. Winner of the BMW Painting Prize in 2011, exhibited in the largest international fairs from Mexico to Miami via Basel, the artist has been able to conquer a global audience without ever betraying his original vision. His solo exhibitions, from the CAC in Malaga to the Fundación La Nave Salinas in Ibiza, testify to an institutional recognition that validates an authentic artistic approach.
His collaboration with prestigious galleries such as Nino Mier in Los Angeles or Allouche Gallery confirms this meteoric rise of an artist who, in less than two decades, has been able to impose a style recognizable among thousands. His works, now present in leading private and institutional collections, are helping to redefine the contours of contemporary European painting.
The Future of a Vision
Today, at 44 years old, Rafa Macarrón is at a turning point in his career. His recent forays into sculpture, notably with his bronze dogs, open up new perspectives for his art. These three-dimensional works, which invite physical interaction with the viewer, naturally extend his reflection on the relationships between humanity and space, between solitude and community.
The Madrid artist offers us an original way to approach the aesthetic challenges of the 21st century. Neither nostalgic for a bygone past nor blindly turned towards a technological future, he draws on the deep resources of the pictorial tradition to invent a resolutely contemporary plastic language. His tender and deformed hybrid creatures speak to us about our era with rare acuity, revealing the flaws and beauties of a humanity in perpetual mutation.
In a world of art often dominated by fashions and mercantile speculations, Rafa Macarrón represents that rare authenticity possessed only by true creators. His work, rooted in a deep spirituality and nourished by multiple influences, from Saint Augustine [1] to the School of Paris via Dubuffet and Miró, constitutes an essential contribution to contemporary painting. It reminds us that art, beyond its decorative or speculative aspects, remains above all a privileged means of exploring the mysteries of the human condition and revealing the hidden beauty of the world.
- Saint Augustine, Confessions, 4th century – Work cited by the artist as fundamental reading in the interview with Carolina Verd, 2018
