The Palace of La Salina reopens its rooms to a view that springs from the earth and time. The Provincial Delegation of Salamanca has just inaugurated ‘Soledades’, the new exhibition by Béjaran designer Purificación del Bosquea proposal that closes … the cultural program of 2025 and opens that of 2026 with an intimate, dense and honest pulse. The exhibition brings together thirty works, seventeen paintings and thirteen drawings, which are exhibited on fabrics, papers and carved wood in a succession of layers that evoke nature, memory and emotion. These are pieces that challenge the viewer with a mixture of proximity and reserve.
The artist herself, who graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Salamanca and completed her training with engraving courses in Madrid, recognizes that returning to exhibit in Salamanca has a deeper meaning than simply returning. “It’s like closing a circle.”explains Ical. The La Salina room, with its stone walls and secluded atmosphere, is what Del Bosque defines as its own interior space. “The room is comfortable,” he said. “I feel comfortable there and the work is also beautiful. It’s something I’ve wanted for a long time and it came true..
This fulfilled wish now materializes in a circuit divided into two main series: Siberiacompleted in 2023, and Algiewith works produced between 2023 and 2025. Two different stages, two vital moments, two sentimental cards that cannot be understood without the other.
The first series, Siberiawas born from a geographical and human experience: the five years during which the artist lived and worked in Herrera del Duque, in the heart of the Extremadura region of Siberia. A territory that many ignore, almost hidden between reservoirs, pastures and long distances; a place that breathes slowly and forces you to look differently.
“It was a discovery,” he remembers. “It’s a land far from everything and everyone. “I wouldn’t have made it any other way.” From this experience were born the works of the series, fourteen paintings which exude calm and a kind of light which borders on the meditative. These are more “friendly” pieces, as she defines them herself, where nature is represented with harmony, although always halfway between figuration and abstraction.
Del Bosque works with fabrics, papers and especially with carved wood, searching on the surface for the nuances that only the material can offer. The drawings that accompany this series, made in pencil and ink, on papers of different textures, are more contained, more intimate. They function as notes of gesture, notes on the margins of the emotional landscape that the artist travels. “Drawing is the foundation on which painting is built. For me and for almost everyone who paints.
If Siberia is an external landscape, Algia It is an interior landscape. The second series, composed of ten paintings and six drawings, arises from personal experiences that Del Bosque does not hide, even if he does not explain them completely either. He does so with sincere modesty, as if he understands that there are experiences worth sharing, but not completely deciphering.
“It’s a series that brings together some sad events in my life,” he admits. “These are things that we experience, which stay inside and which come out when we have to go out.” This process appears filtered by the presence of the surroundings of Castañar de Ibor, a space that the artist visited and which, according to his account, left a lasting impression. The chestnut trees, their density, the way the light slips through the branches, become symbols and presences here.
In Algia, the affair becomes more intense. The color darkens. Recycled materials appear which bring new textures, new readings. It’s a less gentle series, more inseparably emotional. Del Bosque knows it. And he doesn’t try to hide it. “I know Algia can cut harder, it can be harder. But I don’t want it to be liked or not: I want it not to leave people indifferent. “I would even prefer a negative reaction than someone who walks by and doesn’t stop for a second. It’s the worst “what can happen to a work.”
Anyone who walks through Soledades will find the use of light as a common thread. Sometimes gentle, sometimes elusive, sometimes almost a heartbeat. The artist does not work with light as a technical resource, but as a form of truth, a way of placing emotion within the composition. “The treatment of light is different in each series,” he explains. “In Siberia, it’s calmer, more open; in Algia it is darker. This contrast, far from being a rupture, generates an internal movement which accompanies the visitor throughout the journey. It’s as if each work were a chapter of a diary where the landscape functions as a metaphor, but also as a refuge.
Del Bosque combines artistic creation and teaching in a high school in Extremadura, currently in Zarza de Granadilla, a few kilometers from Béjar. But he insists the two worlds do not mix. “They are total opposites,” he admits. “My work is my most personal self; “My work with students is something else.” He does not see it as a contradiction, but as a natural coexistence, two plans which accompany each other without interfering.
His students, especially the older ones, are surprised when they see his work. “It doesn’t hit them,” he said, smiling. They do not expect from someone with their everyday character a work full of density, introspection, silence. But for Del Bosque, this dissociation is healthy and necessary. “They are two parallel worlds that never come together.”
The exhibition will be open throughout the Christmas period and the first weeks of the year. On public holidays it will only open in the morning.
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