Óscar Valero y Mercedes Lara dibujan los umbrales de lo invisible

The exhibition Entrelíneas, recently inaugurated at Galería La Cometa Madrid, brings together the work of Spanish artists Óscar Valero and Mercedes Lara. Through the line as code, boundary, symbol, and substance, both artists explore how the invisible emerges within the visual realm.

What happens when art doesn’t represent, but rather reveals? What can a line say when it no longer defines a form but founds a language?

Entrelíneas, Galería La Cometa Madrid’s latest exhibition, addresses these questions not through answers, but through displacements: with drawings that carry the scent of music, with porcelain that moves like threads of thought, with strokes that don’t seek to represent the world but to touch it in its silence.

The show brings together two artists who, through distinct formal languages, share a common inquiry: the line as a threshold between the visible and the invisible.

The Gesture of Drawing

Since its origins in Greek philosophy, the line has been understood as “length without breadth.” But in Entrelíneas, the line is not geometry—it is body, vibration, code, cartography.

In the work of Madrid-born visual artist and architect Óscar Valero (b. 1977), the line becomes a translation of musical harmony. For Mercedes Lara, an artist from Daimiel (La Mancha, 1973), it is a fully sensorial experience—a territory inhabited from the edge.

Both artists turn the line into a language. For one, it’s a visual score; for the other, a weave of shadow. What in Valero is abstract order, in Lara is living matter. Two seemingly divergent paths that intersect—precisely—between lines.

Óscar Valero: Drawing the Unseen

Trained as an architect and a composer of images, Valero has devoted much of his work to exploring how sound can be translated into space. In this exhibition, his pieces reinterpret Prelude VIII in E minor, BWV 853 by J. S. Bach from a visual standpoint.

Using watercolor on matte polyester, gold ink and graphite on black paper, and a 4-minute video titled Prelude VIII, Valero transforms the musical score into a graphic system—a kind of grid where proportion, rhythm, and melody are visually decoded.

What stands out is not just the rigor of his method but the subtlety of his language. Valero doesn’t illustrate music—he internalizes it. Each line, each gradient, each rhythmic stroke seeks to reveal the invisible architecture within the musical work. The viewer doesn’t just see an image—they listen with their eyes. The line becomes a bridge between the senses, an instrument of expanded perception.

These are not decorative works. They are diagrams of something that no longer sounds, but still vibrates. In his Si Bemol series, for instance, colors like light cobalt blue and Payne’s gray are arranged as visual scales evoking harmony. Each sheet is a suspended note. Each pigment, a question about how to grasp the immaterial.

Mercedes Lara: Cartographies of Touch

While Valero moves from the intangible to the material, Mercedes Lara traces the opposite path: she begins with the body, the land, the skin of the world to speak of what cannot be seen. Her work, deeply connected to her biography—growing up among looms, agricultural fields, and seasons marked by transformation—seeks to express the passage of time and natural cycles using materials like porcelain, felt, cotton thread, and concrete.

In her pieces, the line becomes transition and suture. Her Línea de transmisión series—porcelain works intervened with loom structures on concrete blocks—explores edges and margins where the world transforms. The lines etched into the porcelain recall palmistry or ocean waves. They are signals, scars, tactile memories.

Lara works with fragility as a form of power. Her piece Madre, crafted from felt and cotton thread, is a declaration of origin: the body as matrix, as loom shaping experience. In other works, such as Línea horizontal or Estructura acordonada, the interplay of gold leaf, silk, and concrete generates tension between softness and rigidity, between what embraces and what confines.

Her lines are not abstract. They are borders, skin, atmosphere. A language not to be read, but felt.

An Exhibition in a Liminal State

The curatorial strength of Entrelíneas lies not only in pairing two kindred voices, but in allowing each to breathe independently while engaging in subtle tension. The installation, precise and quiet, imposes no interpretation. It lets the artworks slide forward like their own lines: with rhythm, with pause, with ambiguity.

Open from June 2025 at Galería La Cometa’s Madrid venue, the exhibition also reflects on the limits of art itself. How far can a line go? Can a line speak of the spiritual, the political, the emotional? In this sense, Entrelíneas situates itself within what Maurice Merleau-Ponty called the visible and the invisible: that zone where what cannot be seen supports what is revealed.

From Line to Time

Both artists, from their distinct trajectories, speak of time as the raw material of art. For Valero, it is musical time rendered into image. For Lara, it is natural time inscribed in matter. For both, the line is not speed—it is rhythm. It is not limit—it is threshold.

Entrelíneas doesn’t offer a fixed interpretation. It offers a sensorial, philosophical, and political experience of how we inhabit the world through perception. In a historical moment saturated by fast images and instant messages, this exhibition reclaims art as a form of attention, a practice of visual listening, a space for pause.

What Connects Is Not Always Seen

Sometimes a line divides. Sometimes it unites. Sometimes it simply reveals. That’s what happens in Entrelíneas: every stroke is a passage, every work an invitation to read the world differently—not through noise, but through stillness. Not through representation, but through presence.

Óscar Valero and Mercedes Lara don’t illustrate concepts—they embody them. They make art a place where the invisible is not absence but possibility. Where emptiness vibrates. Where the edge does not close—it opens.

 And all of it happens between lines.