Pliny the Elder tells the anecdote in his Natural History: the Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius organised a competition to determine who was the best artist of their times. Zeuxis presented his now-famous still-life of grapes, painted so realistically that it caught the attention of passing birds, who darted down and pecked, hungrily, at the canvas. As for Parrhasius, he brought along a painting covered by a curtain. When it was his turn to show what was underneath, Parrhasius revealed that the work was in fact the curtain itself, painted with such skill that it could barely be told apart from real fabric. Even Zeuxis had to admit that Parrhasius' artwork was greater than his, because one thing is to trick the birds of the meadow, but quite another thing is to fool an experienced artist like him.

This story is relevant to Jorge Diezma (Madrid, 1973), since his work has always revolved around representation and all its virtues, conflicts and tricks. As such, in his new exhibition at Galería Alegría, the artist seeks to place himself somewhere between the certainty of pictorial matter and the uncertain representation that it allows. In "A Blind Mole's Eyes", Diezma tries to inhabit that space, ever in permanent tension, and turn it into a field of applied research.

Although Diezma's work has always been based on classic genres such as still-life, landscape or portraiture, this time he delves into abstraction, treating it like a genre of painting akin to those just mentioned. The forms that appear in this exhibition are not the result of an analytical breaking-down of reality. Quite the opposite: Diezma's approach is like looking at a place through an infinite zoom, getting so far in that you even see the microscopic elements that make it up. Sometimes we come across spaces of geometric contours; elsewhere we discover strange fields, gloomy and convulsing. Scraps of canvas, superimposed on the paintings, add to that almost scientific feeling of transcending distinct material planes.

We are observers, therefore, of a subatomic painting, which the artist activates by playing around with a kind of uncertainty principle. As such, he ultimately presents a series of paintings in which the very precipitation of the oil paint, over time, is what determines the work's final structure. This is a demanding and highly intense approach. Later in the process, there is a return to representation whereby the artist himself repaints the figure, and so on, in an endless loop.

Jorge Diezma is an outstanding artist, who deftly brings together his mastery of painting with his great conceptual soundness. He acknowledges, at the end of his investigation, that it is impossible to avoid the sublime deception of painting. But he also reminds us that, on occasions, artists must place themselves simultaneously in front of and behind the great curtain of painting - just as Parrhasius did in his day - if they are to create significant works of art. Given this paradoxical position of the painter, the spectator must rigorously assume the role of witness, and note the oscillations of the pictorial matter, ever in search of the traces emitted by its primary radiation by means of its different states and positions. It is therefore a pleasure for Galería Alegría to offer up its space to a unique experience, in which abstraction is opened unto the threshold of its own quantum dimension.

If a painting is a window, a tiny painting is a tiny window. The smaller the window, the bigger the difference between the worlds that it separates; this explains why looking through a keyhole is the ultimate form of voyeurism.

It is as if, in order to see something intimate, we inevitably have to peek through a tiny gap. One gets the impression that if the window gradually got bigger, then the worlds that it separates would slowly become the same, until, if they were to merge, we would be left with nothing but an empty white loft, with little to look at.

The idea of putting together a series that includes what we like the most, both aesthetically and emotionally, is present in the mixtapes that we make for ourselves and for our pals, as well as in the collages of images plastered over teenagers' school folders. With this series of tiny paintings, I am trying to do exactly that.

Jorge Diezma's exhibition at the Botanical Gardens presents still-life paintings of flower vases that point us to the bourgeois tradition, though executed in a style that gives knowing nods to amateur and genre painting, alongside other abstract and colourful paintings which, in this display, serve as a link and loudspeaker for paintings of flowers. These canvases of colour, which we might (cautiously) term ‘abstract', call to mind, in their size and hard-edge, certain Minimalist artworks, such as a number of pieces by Sol LeWitt or Ellsworth Kelly. Despite their cold outline, however, these canvases painted using many overlaid strata of oil paint generate a texture rich in reverberations of colour and rough impasto; recognisable and somewhat romantic sweeps of the brush - without going quite as far as gesturality - that seem to wish to invite us to appreciate the mere pictorial matter as we make our way from one painting of flowers to another. The piece could be compared with a subway line, with the flowers as the stops and the geometries as the journeys between them.

In these paintings of flowers, it possible to identify another connection, one slightly more deeply buried, with a certain avant-garde genre of painting. The still life was a motif repeatedly used by painters in the early 20th century and, if we look back, we can see there is no ism that did not find in it a good basis for its expression. Bearing in mind that the still life was at the very bottom of the classic hierarchy of genres that held sway up until the 19th century, one might infer that there is a subversive aspect to the choice of the still life as a subject for avant-garde paintings. What artists were doing in such works was challenging the very idea of a hierarchy, understood as a sort of stairway with steps that rise from the insignificant to the sublime. Painting in the early 20th century brought the good and the bad together in the same canvas, thenceforth forcing opposites into a strange contiguity, opposites that till then aesthetics had been bent upon keeping as far apart as possible. The paintings by Derain or Renoir in his latter days are good examples of this cohabitation, but if there is one recurrent pictorial reference for Diezma in recent years, then it is the Italian painter Filippo de Pisis, in whose work painting without any value whatsoever and painting of incalculable value are done using the same brush in a strangely simultaneous manner.

Such a mélange brought with it an entire set of new problems: if the bad and the good are now presented to us together, how are we going to be able to distinguish them? The answer was the rise of criticism, which became essential as a means to establish the value of new works, while at the same time the external signs that indicated that we were looking at an important piece multiplied. The small, tacky work painted impulsively and carelessly on a cheap, cracked canvas demanded a vast white wall, which in turn required a distinctive, immaculate building. In this way, with the passing of time, some of these paintings that were both good and bad were simply endorsed as good. How else could the market value of a work be established or a comprehensible history of art be told? However, if we look closely at many of those paintings again, or virtually any painting produced since then, we can see that they are still good and bad at the same time, and it is fascinating (and sometimes frustrating too) to perceive how opposites cohabit in a tightly interwoven intimacy that is impossible to undo.

What Jorge Diezma suggests in this exhibition is precisely that we halt to look at the paintings just at the moment prior to putting them in their place.

En la exposición "Una oveja recorre Europa", la concepción de la pintura gira alrededor de la tensión que se genera entre la materia y la representación. En paralelo a su trabajo más figurativo, como los bodegones de tintes barrocos de grandes dimensiones, ha ido desarrollando una línea abstracta que pone el acento en la materialidad de lo pictórico.