Luisa Catarinéu, born 1978 in Madrid, Spain, develops a painting practice centred on the gaze as a problem. Her work does not depict the everyday: it deactivates it. Domestic scenes, minimal gestures, and family relationships appear as structures in which the seemingly intimate reveals its collective dimension.
Starting from the tension between looking and seeing, her painting introduces an uncomfortable distance between what happens and its recognition. Under the notion of the voyeur, her figures inhabit non-performative moments, instances in which identity manifests itself outside the public, when the awareness of being observed disappears. Far from the anecdotal, her work activates a precise reading of the structures that permeate everyday life: reconciliation, transmission, and the construction of identity. In a context saturated with images, Catarinéu does not add more noise: she introduces friction, compelling us to look where it seemed we had already seen.