In The Backwards Race, Spanish artist Aina Clotas positions the human body as both evidence and mystery: a physical structure, a vessel of feeling and memory, a refuge where we resist reduction into only duty or function. While her paintings are grounded in figuration and shaped by classical training, Clotas perceives the figure as inseparable from abstraction. Her visual narratives combine rationalism with a touch of absurdity, reflecting a generation tangled in societal roles, misinformation, fears, and dreams. In her work, flesh, shadow, gesture, and negative space all become a language through which the rational and irrational move together, allowing the body to speak beyond the strictly literal.

Clotas ties herself as one knot in a larger fabric of human beings trying to make sense of life: through touch, through looking, and through the fragile and necessary act of making images.