Batec
Batec, Castellón
Founded in 2023 in Castellón, Batec is a gallery dedicated to emerging contemporary practices. Working across disciplines such as painting, textiles, and installation, the gallery collaborates with artists whose research explores materiality, affective relationships, landscape, and the symbolic constructions of identity and memory.
Without a permanent physical space, Batec operates from Castellón through collaborations with cultural institutions and other venues. The gallery represents a small group of artists with whom it maintains close, long-term working relationships.
Proposal
For Swab 2026, Batec presents Lucía Vallés and Lola Bonet i Palop in a proposal that connects textile art and painting through the monochrome and the concept of recording. Bonet deconstructs the landscape through simplification, reducing forms and spaces to their essential elements on fabric and paper. Vallés uses tufting to permanently capture her daily food intake. The slow process of textile-making links wool with routine, memory, and bodily rhythms. The proposal establishes a dialogue between Bonet’s recording of the external environment and Vallés’ intimate, corporeal form of documentation.
Lucía Vallés (Alicante, 1999) develops an artistic practice centered on everyday life, food, and the affective bonds that are built around the act of eating. Through textiles, painting, and archival research, she investigates how domestic and repetitive gestures contain forms of memory, care, and cultural identity. Her work draws on familiar and seemingly ordinary elements (food, recipes, shared meals, and the rhythms of the home) to create pieces in which the intimate acquires a collective and symbolic dimension. She holds a degree in Fine Arts and a master in Artistic Production from the Universitat Politècnica de València. Her current research focuses on the relationships between textile practices, time, and autobiographical archives.
Lola Bonet (Valencia,1983), explores and expands the traditional notion of landscape, approaching it not as a representation of the natural world but as a symbolic, bodily, and emotional space. Her work transforms the landscape into a tool for reflection and evocation, shifting from the descriptive toward the sensory and the intangible. Guided by an intimate and poetic gaze, Bonet moves between figuration and abstraction, combining painting, drawing, and installation. Through minimal gestures and an economy of means, she seeks stillness amid the noise of an increasingly digitalized world, investigating the relationship between matter and perception, between what is seen and what is suggested. Light, shadow, emptiness, and surface become structural elements that shape inner, silent landscapes. Her practice questions conventional codes of landscape representation and expands the boundaries of painting beyond the figurative. She conceives the pictorial as an expanded field where time, memory, and presence intertwine, and where the image is not meant to describe but to activate a sensory and contemplative experience.