Under a new moon

Under the faint promise of a new moon, everything seems possible. This moment of darkness, in which the moon hides, is not an absence but a prelude to transformation. In this sense, Under a New Moon is more than a title: it is a point of departure and, perhaps, a threshold. This group exhibition—marking the convergence of La Bibi and Fran Reus galleries in their new shared space in Palma—explores nocturnal metaphors and invites viewers to traverse landscapes of shadow, memory, and change.

Memories in Shadow

In the penumbra of memory, hidden stories emerge—stories still open to reinterpretation. Abel Jaramillo brings us face to face with this potential in Nocturno. Relato fantástico para Celestino Coronado, a video that evokes flickering images and narratives as forms of remembrance, exploring inheritance and echoes of the past that resonate in the present through the poetics of duende. The dark atmosphere extends into his luminous wall sculpture, which bathes the space in a kind of “black sound.”

Tragedy and collective memory find a voice in the work of José Fiol, who pays homage to the Challenger astronauts. His hyperrealistic portraits, painted directly onto Dibond, freeze in black and white the fleeting, tragic moment of a space voyage that ended in disaster. These official images—with smiles suspended in time—confront us with the fragility of human exploration.

In dialogue with this narrative, Marian Garrido’s works appear as fragments of technological catastrophe. Her sculptures resemble spaceship remnants, evoking the memory of the accident. With their aesthetics of wreckage and ruin, these pieces prompt reflection on time’s passage and the inevitability of obsolescence.

Nocturnal Landscapes

Nature under the moon assumes strange and poetic forms. Irati Inoriza’s ceramic pieces hang from the gallery’s columns like branches—fragments of a nocturnal forest. Through texture and form, Inoriza constructs an imaginary world that evokes nature in its darkest, most mysterious dimension, as if these were reliquaries from a hidden realm.

Paul Riedmüller offers a complementary dialogue with paintings that evoke nightscapes and rocky surfaces resembling moons or distant planets. To peer into them is to explore the familiar and the extraterrestrial, without clearly defining the boundary between the two. What happens when we see a familiar landscape with new eyes?

In Bel Fullana’s new paintings, the night becomes fertile ground for a delirious botany. Cosmic flowers sprout in strange terrains, where a character—half intergalactic gardener, half grotesque creature—appears to plant new vegetal species in the vacuum of space. With her distinctive pictorial language, Fullana cultivates an iconography that subverts cuteness, injecting it with strangeness and mutation. How can we survive in an environment not our own? What does it mean to inhabit another dimension, another body, another time? Under this new moon, her universe grows on the fringes of nature, planting the idea of the possible beyond the human.

Lunar Cycles

Among the exhibition’s central works, the Finnish duo Grönlund-Nisunen presents Frozen Globe, a stainless steel sphere subjected to a constant cycle of freezing and thawing—evoking both the lunar surface and the mutability of matter. Its highly polished surface condenses droplets, emphasizing this perpetual transformation.

Miquel Ponce, with his black monochromes speckled with white circles, suggests the appearance and disappearance of the moon—the interplay of light and darkness that marks time’s passage.

In Alejandro Javaloyas’s work, the ellipse is not merely a geometric shape but a conceptual gesture orbiting between visibility and absence. In Mécanismes d’omission d’une ellipse and Mécanismes d’abstraction d’une ellipse (2024), he continues his transdisciplinary investigation into processes of omission, displacement, and meaning-making. The ellipse—dodging the center—resonates with lunar cycles: what appears and disappears, what is suggested but never fully revealed.

Julià Panadès assembles images and objects into a visual language that reflects on ruins, memory, and consumption. His layered compositions create a rhythm where elements intertwine—like craters and human skin—suggesting unexpected connections.

Reflections

Under this new moon, the mirror of identity fragments and multiplies. Grip Face presents the Daily Mirror series—works on mirrors that function as dreamlike shards, exploring identity through reflection, duplicity, and fragmentation.

Callum Green expands the notion of duality with two works on paper that seem to simulate sunrise and sunset, offering a play of light and shadow, day and night, through his gestural and chromatic language.

The duo Maite y Manuel introduces a symbolic and discursive layer with a painting in which, among the characters, a thought bubble reads: Speak your mind. This phrase prompts reflection on expression amid distance, and on the intersubjectivity that shapes the space between people—that unbridgeable distance that language nonetheless attempts to bridge.

In Fátima de Juan’s work, a solitary and powerful woman appears beside a cat, like a silent, independent companion in the night.

Atmospheres

The final section brings together works that directly engage with the exhibition space and its recent transformation. Matter and atmosphere in flux round out the experience. An Wei’s painting Pladur (2025), for example, seems to capture the gallery’s ongoing transformation, reflecting the traces of renovation and the passage of time in this new place now occupied by art.

Similarly, Fausto Amundarain presents two paintings composed of multiple layers—material accumulations that build the pictorial surface like strata.

Lastly, Srger’s Eclipse, a black, gestural monochrome, becomes an enveloping atmosphere and a symbolic closure to the exhibition’s journey.

Under a New Moon is not just an exhibition, but a rite of passage—a collective journey into a fertile darkness where new ways of being together, of enabling unexpected encounters, may emerge. As Octavio Paz once wrote, “There is no moon that does not cast its shadow,” and perhaps it is in that shadow that the possibilities of what is to come await discovery.