PLASTIC STREET

Everything that glitters isn’t always gold; sometimes it’s plastic, sticky, and absurd.

Cala d’Or is a place of extremes. In winter, its streets are hidden under tarps and shuttered blinds; silence becomes almost absolute. In summer, it bursts into color, noise, and visual stimuli—a parade of souvenirs, trinkets, and absurd objects all competing for our attention. This overstimulation inevitably seeps into the work of Maite and Manuel. Everything they walk on, see, and hear becomes painting, collage, controlled chaos, and humor: the city itself is transformed into matter and color.

In this sense, we could say that the experience of entering Plastic Street is also a transformative one. In each piece, fragments of life in Cala d’Or are reorganized and layered, multiplying into strata of color, light, and visual noise. Look out the window (2025), a small work that opens the exhibition, invites us to peek into everyday saturation: windows, reflections, empty luminous streets that seem to melt. In Everything looks fantastic when you are on vacation (2025), the explosion is bigger: tourists, absurd souvenirs, posters, ice creams, go-karts, and music combine in a large canvas of joyful, sticky, brilliant chaos, reflecting the intensity of the summer months.

The exhibition goes beyond painting, creating a hybrid landscape where the physical, the digital, and the sonic intertwine. An installation recreates a local karaoke bar, where classics float through the room, adding another sensory layer: off-key voices and repeated songs, laughter and applause mix with colors, overlapping posters, and inflatables, transforming the experience of the work into a multisensory environment. In this space, the everyday and the absurd coexist, and every visual and sonic element becomes part of the same language.

In Plastic Street, crowded streets, ridiculous souvenirs, layered posters, and inflatables become a visual language that blends humor, excess, and personal memory. Each work functions as a fragment of a city that never stops transforming, a place where overstimulation becomes poetry, and where absurd beauty emerges from the combination of chaos, light, color, and sound.

Maite and Manuel’s work invites us to look again at what we take for granted: saturation can be fascinating, banality can be poetic, and the everyday can transform into an aesthetic experience. Plastic Street is not just a record of the island, but a space where the familiar and the grotesque meet, multiply, and generate a visual and sensory language that only reveals itself when we allow ourselves to be absorbed by it.