Presented within the framework of Art Nou 2026, the exhibition originates from the book La apócrifa historia del Hércules enamorado y de su león emasculado, written by Sergio Mariano Colina, edited by Ignacio Rodríguez Somovilla and illustrated by Marcel Rubio. The story revisits the singular episode surrounding a sculpture of the Farnese Hercules located in the Martí-Codolar gardens in Barcelona during the early 1940s. Inspired by Italian and French garden models, these spaces brought together parterres, fountains, giochi d’acqua, and canal systems designed not only for irrigation but also for ornamentation and playful interaction with water.

From this episode, Marcel Rubio develops an exhibition conceived as a sensitive journey through this imagined garden, reconstructed through memory, observation, and drawing. For the first time, the artist does not begin with a fixed theme or predefined narrative, but instead proposes a visual drift akin to the movement of a camera slowly advancing and pausing on the smallest details: plants, shadows cast across the ground, stones, flowers, the garden’s inhabitants, and the possible encounters that might unfold within this space.

The exhibition unfolds entirely through drawing, transformed here not only into a technique but into the very language and living material of the show itself. Rather than representing the garden, the works seem to wander through and inhabit it, allowing the gesture of drawing to expand across different surfaces and situations. In this sense, the exhibition proposes a contemplative experience in which the anecdotal, the ornamental, and the everyday acquire a poetic dimension, revealing the garden as a space of fiction, memory, and constant transformation.

With this exhibition, galeria SENDA joins the Art Nou 2026 programme through a proposal that positions drawing as a tool for observation and displacement, inviting viewers to enter a landscape shaped by attentiveness to detail, imagination, and the transformative potential of gesture.

The exhibition also incorporates the inspiring presence of Greek dancer Vangélis Liopirákis, whose sensitivity and corporeality have accompanied the project’s imaginary world and permeate many of the figures and atmospheres inhabiting the exhibition.