Carlos Bellido Flores:
Paint, Body, Tensión

Thick impasto fields, cinematic compositions, and bodies caught mid-gesture. An uncompromised look inside his material friction and physical presence.

Dazed. Joe Bobowicz. Roland Mouret. Royal Ballet soloist Nicol Edmonds. When Studies of the Figure opened at 81 Goldsmiths Row & later Hayhill in Mayfair, it brought the essence of cool.

Carlos Bellido Flores' canvases are heavy, thick with impasto layers, sharp colour fields, and physical male forms caught precisely mid-gesture. "I want it to be open to interpretation. I'm not trying to preach about anything or force any particular theme," he notes. Yet, the work actively speaks.

Born in southern Spain, he perfected his craft at the Royal College of Art. He's developed a style built on impasto - continuously layering paint. "Oil paint doesn't evaporate; it oxidises," he says. "It's kind of a hands-on thing to look at." The process stays visible. That's the point.

Friends, strangers, dancers from the Royal Opera House, men seen playing football on a beach - all of them caught between the act… and the aftermath. "I'm a gay man and I'm used to the male body," he says. "But whatever sexual tension exists between these figures is not direct."

Cinema is the reference he keeps returning to: Cassavetes, Pasolini, Bresson, Tarkovsky, Almodóvar. Passionate, long films. Faces held in close-up. "A sex scene doesn't have to show you the moment itself - it could be conveyed just as intensely by showing you close-ups of faces, the energy or the sound."