Luis Pérez Calvo Artist's Trading Cards

Description

Luis Pérez Calvo
Artist's Trading Cards

An Emotional Map of Art in Madrid (2015–2025)

Over the past decade, Luis Pérez Calvo has created over five hundred paintings, the result of his exploration of exhibitions in Madrid and occasionally elsewhere. Rather than merely documenting what he has seen, he recreates it through an imagination shaped by B-movies, circuses, festivities, comics, neighbourhood shop signs and vinyl record covers.

Venturing beyond the major museums, Pérez Calvo’s exploration has taken him to galleries, workshops, independent spaces and pop-up cultural projects. Providing a counterpoint to the narratives that dominate the art scene, his gaze pays scant heed to academic, institutional or commercial criteria, instead allowing itself to be guided by aesthetic affinities and personal bonds.

Pérez Calvo has entitled this collection Artist's Trading Cards, as a tribute to the first form of popular collecting, with all those albums and lucky bags, that he enjoyed as a child in the Plaza del Campillo in Madrid and at El Rastro (flea market) on Sundays. Far from being a mere sentimental reference, this universe fundamentally structures Pérez Calvo’s modus operandi.

In his approach to art, he is really no different to how he was as a young boy collecting trading cards: enthusiastic, curious, contextualized and relational. In stark opposition to market-driven validation systems, he proposes a playful poetics that is deliberately humble in scale and materiality. The exchange he promotes is not based on accumulation, but on bonds: a network of complicities, recognitions and intertwined memories.

This exhibition, which comprises a selection of “trading cards” and a mural created in situ, invites visitors to view the recent history of art and art exhibitions from an unexpected angle and to collectively reconstruct the shows we experienced and the ones we missed. He does not offer an exhaustive vision of that history, nor does he aspire to establish a canon; rather, he presents a constellation of images in which art is celebrated and shared, bringing us together.

Luis Pérez Calvo (Madrid, 1962) is a multidisciplinary artist who has devoted much of his career to recuperating popular Spanish iconography from the 1960s, 70s and 80s through drawing, collage, painting, and ceramics. His instantly recognisable style fuses nostalgia, kitsch, and street art to create a visual universe that revisits everyday objects, comics, musical culture and graphic advertising, all loaded with humour and social critique.

He has held outstanding solo exhibitions in spaces such as La Gran (Madrid and Valladolid), the Patio Herreriano Museum and the Marisa Marimón Gallery. The titles of his exhibitions - Unplugged, Turning Pages, and LPC and Friends: Noise and Fury on the Other Side clearly demonstrate his interest in the autobiographical, the playful and the ephemeral.

His work has featured in numerous collective exhibitions in Spain and abroad - France, the United Kingdom, Germany, South Korea, Cuba and the United States - at institutions such as María Cristina Masaveu Peterson Foundation, CAC Málaga, Condeduque Cultural Centre, Casa Encendida and Cervantes Institute in Chicago. He has also participated in art fairs such as Estampa, Urvanity and Mulafest, and in international projects such as Imago Mundi (the Luciano Benetton Collection). His work can be found in important public and private collections including those of the MACVAC (Castellón), La Caixa Foundation, María Cristina Masaveu Peterson Foundation and Las Rozas City Hall.

Carlos Delgado Mayordomo (Madrid, 1979) is the curator of this exhibition.
A graduate in Art History from the Complutense University of Madrid and a Master's in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Culture from the UOC, he currently serves as Artistic Director of the Las Rozas Culture Foundation. He combines this work with art criticism for ABC Cultural and university teaching, including the Master's in Art Market at Nebrija University. Since 2008, he has had an extensive career as an independent curator, organizing more than fifty exhibitions in museums and art centers in Spain and Latin America.