Affectus Exhibition: Rural Spain surprised me

I paint queer love in a world that doesn't always want to see it. This June, a tiny town in rural Spain proved me wrong.

My work has been shown in London, Madrid, São Paulo. Cities with a critical mass of galleries, of queer spaces, of people who've learned to expect this kind of painting. But Affectus — my current solo exhibition at the Museo Histórico de Las Merindades in Medina de Pomar — feels different from all of them. Not louder. Just more necessary.

Medina de Pomar is a medieval town in the north of Spain, in the heart of Castile. Stone walls, a fortress, a population of around five thousand people. It is not, by any conventional measure, the kind of place where you'd expect to find large-scale contemporary paintings of queer intimacy hanging in a museum commissioned by the local government.

And yet, here we are.

Why rural visibility matters

I want to be careful not to romanticise this. The fact that Affectus exists in Medina de Pomar is not just a feel-good story about a small town being surprisingly progressive. It's something more important than that — and something we don't talk about nearly enough.

When we think about LGBTQ+ visibility, we tend to think about cities. About Pride parades in Madrid or Barcelona, about queer art spaces in London or Berlin, about representation concentrated in places that have already built the infrastructure to hold it. And that visibility matters enormously. But it can also create a quiet assumption — that queerness is an urban phenomenon, that the fight for representation is somehow over once you leave the city limits.

It isn't.

For a queer teenager growing up in a small town in rural Spain — or rural anywhere — the absence of mirrors is its own kind of violence. Not necessarily dramatic. Often just quiet, persistent, suffocating. You grow up not seeing yourself in the art on walls, in the stories people tell, in the couples holding hands in the street. And that absence shapes you. It tells you, without words, that you are the exception. The anomaly. The thing that happens somewhere else.

References matter. Representation in culture isn't decoration — it's information. It tells people what's possible. It tells them they exist.

What Affectus is

This exhibition brings together nearly two years of work exploring affection, intimacy and vulnerability between men. Through contemporary figurative painting, I've been trying to expand the visual narratives we associate with masculinity — to propose new symbols, new myths, new spaces of belonging for queer experience.

Among the paintings is a monumental contemporary Saint Sebastian, standing 1.95 metres tall — created specifically for this space and this community. Sebastian has been a queer icon for centuries, reclaimed across art history as a figure of beauty, suffering and survival. To place him here, in a historical museum in a conservative region of northern Spain, felt right in a way I didn't fully understand until I stood in the room with him.

Many of the pieces are being shown publicly for the first time. They represent the most honest body of work I've made.

What it means to show here

I've spent a long time thinking about where art lives and who it reaches. A painting in a gallery in Shoreditch or in the Malasaña neighbourhood of Madrid will find its audience — people who are already looking, already open, already part of a conversation that validates queer experience as worthy of serious artistic attention.

But a painting in Medina de Pomar might reach someone who has never walked into a contemporary art gallery. A teenager who grew up here. A father who doesn't quite have the words yet. A grandmother who came because it's free on Sunday mornings. And when that person stands in front of a painting of two men in a moment of quiet tenderness — and feels something shift, even slightly — that is not a small thing.

That is why I make this work.

The municipality of Medina de Pomar commissioned Affectus as part of their Pride weekend — Medina de Pomar, Siente el Orgullo. That decision, made by local government in a place like this, is itself an act of representation. It says: this community belongs here too. It says: queer joy is not something that happens only in capital cities.

On June 28, the final day of the exhibition, I'll be giving a guided tour of the show followed by a public talk on LGBTQ+ visibility, art, and identity. It's free and open to everyone. Come if you can — bring whoever you love.

And if you can't make it to Burgos, the work can still find you. Some originals from the series will become available, along with fine art prints. Links below.

Affectus runs until June 28, 2026 at the Museo Histórico de Las Merindades, Medina de Pomar, Burgos, Spain.

Explore the paintings → Take a print home →