Paula Valdeón’s work stems from an interest in how we manage ornament within our homes and architecture. Urban material culture constitutes the starting point for a practice that traverses the memory and aesthetics of everyday life.
Her research focuses on the fiction of the natural within ornament, understanding the decorative as a layer that coats architecture, objects, and even the body itself. The surfaces we inhabit appear constantly shot through with motifs, textures, and patterns that make spaces more livable, more familiar, or easier to look at.
Her works explore the possibilities of matter, transforming it until the image returns to the organic. To achieve this, she incorporates materials typical of both construction and traditional painting as tools capable of generating questions about the relationship between appearance, materiality, and perception.
In this process, a constant tension emerges between the fragile and the persevering: between ornamental surfaces—light, shifting, and exposed—and the structures that sustain them. Her work positions itself precisely at that point of friction, where the visible always depends on that which remains behind.