Born in 1976, Madrid 

Leaves and works in Madrid Spain)

Carlos Tárdez is a multidisciplinary artist who could be framed in figurative 

art but with the added bonus that his paintings hide a deep symbolic layer behind an appearance 

of everyday life. As Tárdez himself explains, «My work is born out of my experiences. I try to 

always keep in mind the banality of what I do, because only from unpretentious sincerity does t

he idea arise. Every day new elements appear and reappear. That’s why I don’t set myself any 

objectives. I paint out of an inner need. It is from my own work that new questions arise, new projects».

Both in painting and sculpture, he has achieved a high level of quality that has earned him, 

among many other awards, the BMW Medal of Honor in 2010 and 2018. 

Both in his paintings and his in sculptures there are mythological connotations, double meanings 

and great irony in the reinterpretations of everyday scenes and objects.

This fact is particularly evident in his sculpture (in this case, in addition to the polychrome resins, 

there are also pieces made of bronze), where he uses a preconceived idea or an object associated 

with a meaning and turns it upside down.

On the canvas he tries to express the idea in the most direct way possible, his pictorial technique 

and the realism employed are careful, generating simple and emphatic compositions in which 

emptiness takes on a meaning and, in many cases, carries the conceptual weight in a treatment of s

pace that drinks directly from abstract painting.

Color also has a direct relationship with the distribution of space, atmosphere and depth. The 

psychological influence and symbolic value of color are given great importance. It is also common 

to see horizontal or vertical bands of matt black appearing in his paintings that delimit the space.

It is a symbolic figuration, with a series of resources that have enriched its own iconography. 

The title of each of the works suggests and reinforces the idea on many occasions, always leaving 

open the subjective interpretation of the viewer.