Daniel Barrio | HAZEGALLERY

DANIEL BARRIO

Madrid-based artist Daniel Barrio develops a material-driven painting practice rooted in classical fresco while extending it into contemporary supports, spatial situations and technological environments. Working with lime mortar, pumice, plaster, reclaimed cardboard, worn advertising PVC, canvas and other recovered materials, he approaches painting not as an image placed on a surface, but as a physical process through which time, use and memory become materially visible.

Barrio’s work is shaped by his experience of growing up in Cuba, where monuments, official narratives and seemingly stable structures revealed themselves as fragile and provisional. Rather than treating this history as autobiographical subject matter, he uses it as an analytical framework for examining architecture, ideology and the residues of public space. His works often begin with materials that have already circulated through the city, allowing discarded surfaces and fragments to carry their previous histories into new pictorial structures.

Across his practice, the logic of fresco becomes a way of thinking through permanence, erosion and transformation. Barrio works a giornata, following the rhythm of wet mortar and allowing the material to determine the pace of production rather than forcing it into a predetermined image. Alongside these analogue processes, he also incorporates digital tools and virtual environments, creating situations in which the viewer shifts from passive observer to active participant.

Artist Biography

Daniel Barrio was born in Cienfuegos, Cuba, in 1988 and currently lives and works in Madrid. He trained in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cienfuegos and later studied Production Design at ECAM, the Madrid Film and Audiovisual School. The combination of visual art and scenographic thinking became central to his understanding of space, leading him to approach painting as an environment rather than as a conventional pictorial window.

His practice combines classical fresco techniques with unconventional supports and recovered materials, including cardboard, advertising posters, PVC, lime plaster, pumice and wax. These materials are not used as decorative references but as structural elements carrying their own physical and cultural histories.

Barrio has presented solo exhibitions at Galería María Porto, PlusArtis and Navel Art in Madrid. He participated in ESTAMPA Art Fair in 2023 and Art Madrid in 2026, where he presented Despiece. Protocolo de Mutación. His work has also been shown in group exhibitions at OB Contemporary, Espacio Valverde Gallery, Ámbito Cultural El Corte Inglés in Lisbon, Museo de La Rioja and Museo Torreón de Haro.

Practice

Barrio’s practice begins with the idea of space as an unstable archive. Architecture, advertising, institutional structures and urban surfaces are treated as records that accumulate, fragment and disappear over time. Painting becomes a method for making these fractures visible through material rather than through representation alone.

Material is central to this process. Plaster, lime mortar, pumice, reclaimed cardboard, worn PVC and wax are selected for the resistance and historical friction they carry. Fresco is particularly important because its process cannot be fully controlled: the mortar sets according to its own physical conditions, forcing the artist to work within a limited temporal structure. Barrio treats this limitation as an ethical and conceptual principle, following the material rather than attempting to dominate it.

Technology enters the practice as another form of support rather than as a separate medium. Digital tools and virtual environments allow Barrio to expand the limits of the pictorial plane and create situations in which the viewer becomes physically involved in the construction of meaning. The work ultimately focuses less on delivering fixed narratives than on asking how memory is produced through contact with material, space and experience.

Selected Exhibitions

2026, Despiece. Protocolo de Mutación, Art Madrid, Madrid.
2023, ESTAMPA Art Fair, Madrid.
Solo exhibition, Galería María Porto, Madrid.
Solo exhibition, PlusArtis, Madrid.
Solo exhibition, Navel Art, Madrid.
Group exhibition, OB Contemporary.
Group exhibition, Espacio Valverde Gallery.
Group exhibition, Ámbito Cultural El Corte Inglés, Lisbon.
Group exhibition, Museo de La Rioja.
Group exhibition, Museo Torreón de Haro