15 January – 21 February 2026
Madrid
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The “sweet spot” is a recognizable experience and yet one that is difficult to describe. It is a threshold between tension and harmony, between control and chance, that produces a fleeting feeling of fullness and happiness. It is the moment when a sail aligns with the wind, when the ball strikes the exact center of the racket, when all flavors balance in a single bite, or when the perfect ratio between whipped cream and flan is achieved. For Josep Maynou, a “sweet spot” is the term he uses—within the intimate space of therapy—to name moments of inner peace and satisfaction with life, when everything feels just right.
In Maynou’s practice, the sweet spot manifests in multiple ways. It often emerges from the pleasure he finds in discovering a kind of “poetic truth” in discarded or seemingly worthless objects. Guided by an almost unconscious intuition, the artist collects them and reestablishes connections between them, activating a delicate balance between chance and precision, as if the objects had been waiting for the right gaze.
In PUNTO DULCE, Josep Maynou’s first solo exhibition in Madrid, this concept translates into that moment when, through alignment or coincidence, everything seems to fall into place. To this end, the artist constructs—out of everyday objects, family memories, and gestures of humor—an intimate landscape in which the fragile and the domestic are transformed into a site of reunion. Amid the accelerated pace at which we experience the world, Maynou proposes a pause to find the sweet spot in ephemeral moments of harmony, beauty, and simplicity that often go unnoticed or are taken for granted. From this perspective, the experience reveals a dual and cyclical nature, in which something exists just for an instant before disappearing, perceptible only through a contemplative way of life.
For this exhibition, Josep Maynou transforms part of the space into an intimate setting inspired by the Maresme, a littoral region near Barcelona associated with the summers of his childhood and his family memories, and to which he has decided to return after living in other countries for eighteen years. The landscape materializes through found and discarded objects that the artist reinscribes into a new cycle of value: seagulls made from clothes hangers soaring over the sea, a basketball game at a sunset on mosaic, a beach club towel stolen by his father, a Yamaha Jog motorcycle—a symbol of freedom for many young people in the 1990s—, a column of beer cans.
In one room, sweet spots tied to adolescence, friendship and the freedom of living in flip-flops by the sea; in another, sweet spots of the present: a video of his daughter sleeping peacefully. In this space, the baby is surrounded by fried eggs—pieces made from toilet tank lids and ping-pong balls—that condense the tension of attempting and the pleasure of success: that precise instant when something improbable happens and becomes immortalized.
Giving new life to discarded, found, collected and recycled objects—even those coming from his father’s home (who passed away shortly before Maynou learned that he himself was going to become a father)—becomes here a broader metaphor. It is a gesture of sustainability and care and, at the same time, a way of thinking about memory, continuity, and endings. Through objects and humor—always present in Maynou’s work—the exhibition is situated at a temporal crossroads where life and death symbolically coincide for a moment. Works such as Memento mori, a skull that embraces both life and the inevitability of its end, remind us that death is close—not as a threat, but as a reminder of the urgency of living fully.
Text by Iyari Elefteriu
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