The Last Refuge

In The Last Refuge, Héctor Acevedo builds a symbolic bestiary where the human, the animal and the mechanical merge without hierarchy. Winged figures fold in on themselves amid forests of red spheres populated by tiny houses; serpents, dragons and hybrid creatures confront or embrace each other in dreamlike landscapes suspended between falling and flight.

The title of the exhibition condenses his central obsession: the refuge not as a safe destination, but as a gesture — a body that shrinks, a hand that holds, a wing that no longer seeks the sky but a place to fold back into. Acevedo works in series that speak to one another (Alado sin Cielo I and II, Opuestos Complementarios, El Último Vuelo), revisiting the same symbols — serpents, wings, fragmented houses, chromatic spheres — shifting their meaning from one work to the next.

Presented in the exceptional setting of the Pabellón Villanueva, between the nineteenth-century architecture and the greenery of the Real Jardín Botánico, the exhibition proposes a counterpoint: where nature orders and classifies, Acevedo's painting unfolds a universe of unresolved dualities — attack and offering, threat and tenderness, fall and takeoff — that resist any taxonomy.