Miart
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Overview
BAT Sculpt #10
ONE’S NATURAL HABITAT
Pedro Liñares & Leo Orta
miart 2026 — Booth F11, Level 1
miart 2026 — Booth F11, Level 1
Andrea Festa Fine Art presents One’s Natural Habitat, a two-person booth conceived as a dialogue between painting and sculpture, where perception unfolds through material, memory, and spatial experience.
The presentation brings together two distinct practices that converge in their attention to what is subtle, peripheral, and often overlooked. Rather than asserting fixed images or forms, both Pedro Liñares and Leo Orta approach their work as something that gradually comes into being—through processes of transformation, accumulation, and adaptation.
At the core of the booth lies a tension between surface and space.
Pedro Liñares’ paintings originate from intimate observations accumulated over time, both within the studio and in his immediate surroundings. Personal objects, decorative motifs, and fragments of everyday life act as points of departure for a painterly investigation that translates memory into atmosphere. As the artist notes, the works do not begin from overarching narratives, but from a close attention to “seemingly simple elements—personal objects, patterns, ornaments, and details drawn from everyday life,” which are gradually displaced and reconfigured.
Through a process of layering, repetition, and subtle erosion, these elements lose their original function and open onto new interpretations. Within this intermediate space, the everyday is gently estranged, allowing painting to evoke sensations that remain suspended between clarity and ambiguity. Images do not present themselves immediately; they emerge slowly, as if surfacing from within the painting itself.
In contrast, Leo Orta’s sculptural practice operates directly in space, engaging matter as a living and transformative agent. His works—composed of recovered materials, natural fibers, and industrial remnants—develop as hybrid forms that blur distinctions between organic and artificial, animate and inanimate.
The Bat Sculpt series presented at miart marks a shift toward a more spatially responsive approach. Moving beyond traditional display, the works are “suspended, inverted, or attached to branching structures,” echoing the ways bats inhabit caves and trees. In this context, the exhibition space itself becomes a site of negotiation, where sculpture interacts with architecture, gravity, and orientation.
For Orta, the bat functions as a figure through which to reflect on our unstable relationship with other living beings—an animal whose presence is often perceived indirectly, shaped as much by projection as by experience. As he suggests, it is a presence “felt more than clearly seen,” inhabiting a sensory world that escapes our own.
Together, Liñares and Orta construct a dialogue that is less concerned with representation than with conditions of experience. If Liñares works from within the surface—allowing images to emerge through time—Orta extends outward, activating space through forms that seem to evolve, adapt, and breathe.
One’s Natural Habitat ultimately proposes a reflection on how forms come into being: not as fixed entities, but as processes shaped by time, perception, and environment. Across both practices, the works resist immediacy, inviting instead a slower mode of looking—one that embraces uncertainty as a generative and necessary space.
Works
Press release
miart 2026 — Booth F11, Level 1
17 — 19 April, 2026
ONE’S NATURAL HABITAT — PEDRO LIÑARES & LEO ORTA
Andrea Festa is pleased to present One’s Natural Habitat, a two-person presentation bringing together Pedro Liñares and Leo Orta, whose practices—while formally distinct—converge in their exploration of perception, materiality, and the subtle conditions that shape how we inhabit the world.
At the core of the presentation lies a shared attention to what is often overlooked: the quiet structures of everyday experience, the latent life of materials, and the unstable boundary between the visible and the sensed.
Pedro Liñares’ paintings unfold through a process of accumulation and erasure, where images emerge gradually from layered, opaque surfaces. Drawing from personal surroundings—ornaments, domestic objects, fragments of architecture—his works translate memory into atmosphere. Motifs are isolated, repeated, and displaced, allowing the familiar to shift into a space of ambiguity, where perception remains suspended between recognition and abstraction.
In parallel, Leo Orta’s sculptural practice engages directly with matter as a living, transformative agent. His works—often composed of recovered materials, natural fibers, and industrial remnants—develop as hybrid forms that oscillate between organic and artificial, presence and disappearance. In the *Bat Sculpt* series presented at Miart, sculpture abandons the logic of the pedestal to inhabit space more instinctively: suspended, inverted, or emerging from the architecture, echoing the spatial behaviors of the bat itself.
Together, Liñares and Orta construct a dialogue between painting and sculpture that is less about representation than about conditions of experience. If Liñares works from within the surface—allowing images to surface slowly, almost archaeologically—Orta extends outward, activating space through forms that seem to evolve, adapt, and breathe.
One’s Natural Habitat thus proposes a reflection on how forms come into being: not as fixed entities, but as processes shaped by time, memory, and environment. Across both practices, the work resists immediacy, inviting instead a slower mode of looking—one that acknowledges uncertainty as a generative space rather than a limit.
Pedro Liñares (b. 1988) lives and works between Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro. He studied Visual Arts at the School of Fine Arts of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He was a scholarship student at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage. He holds a Master’s degree in Multimedia Art from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Lisbon. His practice explores, through a non-narrative approach, how visual information can be repurposed to generate new meanings, examining the relationship between everyday experience and painting. His work offers glimpses of contemporary reality, foregrounding its complexity and the ambiguity of meaning from an intimate and personal perspective.
Leo Orta (b. 1993) Lives and works in Paris, a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, painting, and performance. A graduate of the Design Academy Eindhoven, his practice probes human relationships, material cycles, and environmental concerns. Drawing inspiration from psychoanalysis, surrealism, and industrial production, Orta employs upcycled materials to create evocative works that question sustainability and the ecological impact of contemporary life. He has exhibited internationally at venues including FRAC, K11 Guangzhou, and Frieze London. His works can be seen in Centre Pompidou & Silver Parrot Tulipe, Indépendance park, Morges.
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