There is a silence that precedes every beginning. A brief, almost imperceptible pause before something manifests. It is in that instant, before the gesture, before the color, where Anna Nero’s painting is born. In that suspended territory, where intuition has not yet been tamed by form, but where the direction is already sensed.
"No Tenderness" is not a warning, but a declaration of principles. There is no sweetness in these paintings, at least not in the conventional sense of the term. What there is, is tension, analysis, confrontation. Tenderness, if it appears, is filtered, manipulated, traversed by layers of irony, structure, and ambivalence. In Anna Nero’s work, painting is not offered as refuge, but as a space for thought.
For her, painting is not about representation, nor even expression. Painting is thinking out loud. Her pictorial practice is a way of positioning oneself in front of the world, processing and reconstructing it through visual language. In her works, the gesture becomes thought, and the canvas, far from being a window or a mirror, transforms into a surface loaded with decisions: a space where time is paused, where color and form embody a way of being in the world. Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that "the world is not in front of me as an object, but it surrounds me, penetrates me, and I am part of it." This embodied perception, this bodily and sensitive experience of the environment, resonates deeply in Nero’s work. Her paintings do not represent reality from a distance, but incorporate it, making it present through a visual grammar that is experienced with the eyes, yes, but also with the whole body. Her work does not seek to illustrate an idea, but to activate a perception.
Her work is constructed from friction, from the rub between what might seem incompatible. It is in this intersection that the energy that sustains her work is produced. Formally, this tension is manifested in the coexistence of rigid lines and gestural strokes, in the combination of colors evoking childhood with materials of industrial weight, in the overlapping of dense textures and flat surfaces. But this friction is also conceptual: her work lies between the playful and the critical, between the emotional and the technical, never fully resolving these poles. Rather than seeking synthesis, Nero holds the conflict, keeping the tension alive in the viewer’s gaze. Thus, "No Tenderness" can be read as a study of duality, but also as an affirmation that painting and sculpture do not need to choose between opposites. Here, the soft and the hard, the warm and the cold, the rational and the intuitive coexist on the same plane. There is something almost sculptural in the way the forms occupy the space of the painting, in how they organize, collide, or repel each other. At the same time, there is a materiality that is intensely tactile: one has the sensation of being able to touch the paintings and feel the weight of the color, the roughness of the stroke, the thickness of the acrylic. In the end, painting is not something to be viewed: it is something to inhabit.
If I reflect on color, it is undoubtedly a protagonist in Anna Nero’s work. The colors are not mere companions to the drawing or the gesture, but autonomous entities, full of character. A palette established and tied to the artist. In her hands, color becomes a sign, a symbol, but also a structure. The way she combines, overlays, or faces them creates an internal rhythm in each piece, a cadence that guides our gaze without imposing it. Contemplating these paintings is confronting a unique system of signs. Anna Nero has developed a visual vocabulary that draws from multiple sources: graphic design, advertising, pop culture, geometric abstraction, digital art...; yet it is articulated with a very precise internal coherence. Her works function as fragments of a language we do not always understand rationally, but which we intuitively grasp. There is something in them that speaks to us directly, without the need for translation.
In a present marked by immediacy and overproduction, Anna Nero’s work stands as an act of resistance. It speaks to us about the value of attention, of conscious gesture, of analysis as a way of being in the world. Her painting does not seek easy answers but opens spaces for reflection where the beautiful and the uncomfortable coexist, without the need to reconcile. "No Tenderness" is an experience that places us at the limits of perception. It forces us to question what we expect from an image, what we seek in a painting, what it means to contemplate something without expecting an immediate response. Anna Nero, without offering concessions, invites us to participate in a deeper process: the process of looking to understand, to feel, to think.
Perhaps that is why this exhibition also speaks of beginnings. Because each work is a starting point. A new attempt. A small declaration of autonomy in the face of chaos. To paint here is not to surrender to aesthetics, but to exercise it as a form of critical thought. A way of analyzing our environment, what we see, and how we see it. And in this process, tenderness is not absent, but it has changed form. It is no longer softness or comfort. It is rigor, it is commitment, it is clarity.
Curatorial text by Raquel Victoria
