The collective Los Manchas was formed in 2018 in the painting workshops of the University of the Arts, and it is comprised of Marco Morocho (1994), Ray Medina (1993), Cristhian Godoy (1995), and Omar Bereche (1996). At the end of that same year, they carried out a public space intervention in the city of Cuenca, Ecuador, as part of the 14th Cuenca Biennial. Their first collective exhibition was in 2019, titled Área 51. Subsequently, they have held exhibitions in a collective format but with individual works, such as El hombre invisible, La prórroga, For Kids, and Bad Painting, from 2020 to 2023.

In this exhibition, the universe of meanings constructed in their collective proposal traverses a series of signs that land on the pictorial plane and spill over into both common and individual interests. There is the landscape, which subverts a fictional and/or apocalyptic vision of the future, as well as its condition as a space, understood as a stage for suggestive fabulations, where the presence or absence of man determines its condition of being. Man is seen either as a character selected from the ecosystem to be observed and analyzed through the various desolate scenarios left as traces of his actions, or from a perspective that underscores the tension between the interior and exterior of the body. Painting, as pleasure, necessity, or play, is liberated through individual pursuits and is combined with plastic resources that give volume, contrast, and definition to the craft, a kind of punchlines (in freestyle battles: an improvisation competition, won by those who deliver the best punchlines—final blow or clincher). In other words, visual narratives in certain cases can arise from spontaneous interests in what surrounds us, what we encounter while browsing the web, creating a match that evolves into artwork. The landscape, the body, the subject, fiction, the interior and exterior, the mysterious and the banal allow us to create a figuration, a reality modified, exalted in lights and forms, a painting distinct and superior to our experience.

– Los Manchas