Michel Pérez Pollo: Double Gaze

Michel Pérez Pollo doesn’t paint organic objects so much as interrogate our interaction with them, and for his fourth exhibition at Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich, the interrogation comes in pairs. Double Gaze, new paintings built from hand-worked clay and Play-Doh maquettes he seems to trust more than the world itself, offers no answer as to which form is the original and which its shadow, and has no intention of pretending otherwise.

Most painters who work from observation have the decency to let you know what you’re looking at. Pérez Pollo isn’t interested in that decency. He builds the thing himself — clay, Play-Doh, some object with no prior claim to existing — and then paints it as though it had always been there, daring you to ask questions it was never going to answer. The maquette on the table is not a study for the painting. In a way, it is the painting’s alibi. Morandi spent a career disciplining actual bottles into near-abstraction, flattening the world down to essence. Pérez Pollo runs the operation in reverse — invents an object that owes nothing to anyone, then paints it into a specificity so convincing you’d swear you’d seen it before. It is a witty trick, performed by someone who clearly enjoys knowing you’ll fall for it. I know I certainly did.

Two forms, offset as in Double Offset (2026) or stacked as in Double Balance (2026), invite and dare the viewer to hunt for the seam that proves one is the copy. At least, that’s how I read this uncanny use of pairing. And of course, there isn’t one. There was never going to be one. What you’ll notice instead, if you’re patient enough to be embarrassed by your own hunting, is that hue and light matter. Brushwork and spatiality matter. The basic principles of painting; shape, line, color, and surface, matter. And our gaze — in this case a double gaze instead of doomscroll gaze, courtesy of Michel Pérez Pollo — is under scrutiny itself, which matters.

Michel Pérez Pollo, Double Delay, 2026. Oil on linen, two parts — 59.06 x 70.87 in / 150 x 180 cm. Courtesy Mai 36 Galerie © Michel Pérez Pollo

Michel Pérez Pollo, Double Offset, 2026. Oil on linen, two parts — 28.74 x 39.37 in / 73 x 100 cm. Courtesy Mai 36 Galerie © Michel Pérez Pollo

Michel Pérez Pollo, Double Slow Action, 2026. Oil on linen, two parts — 39.37 x 78.74 in / 100 x 200 cm. Courtesy Mai 36 Galerie © Michel Pérez Pollo

Michel Pérez Pollo, Double Balance, 2026. Oil on linen — 78.74 x 78.74 in / 200 x 200 cm. Courtesy Mai 36 Galerie © Michel Pérez Pollo

Michel Pérez Pollo, Double Misreading, 2026. Oil on linen — 78.74 x 78.74 in / 200 x 200 cm. Courtesy Mai 36 Galerie © Michel Pérez Pollo

 

 

Born in Manzanillo in 1981, trained between Holguín and the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, Pérez Pollo has spent his years in Madrid absorbing the Andalusian Baroque as his artistic inheritance. I like to imagine a resemblance in the humid stillness Zurbarán built entire theologies out of, now redeployed to dignify a fistful of Play-Doh with a gravity it has done nothing to earn and, somehow, gets away with anyway — that analogy is an unjustifiable stretch, yet it works for me.

The gestures are light. Almost careless, in the way that only someone who has fully earned the right to look careless can afford to be. There’s pleasure in the handling, and not a small amount of self-satisfaction — this is a painter who knows precisely how good he is at this and has stopped bothering to disguise it. In a moment allergic to anything that asks for a second look, let alone a fourth or fifth, a painting content to stay unsettled by our double gaze — to make you stare at an invented object twice for no productive reason — reads like contempt for your impatience. Pérez Pollo seems entirely aware of how funny that is. And I am utterly grateful for that realization, as it is arguably the most productive way to look at painting today.

For more information, please consult Mai 36 Gallery’s website here →

Last Updated on July 27, 2026