Candy Bassas Paints Bathers Who Never Fully Leave the Dark

Galerie Mellies Presents dancing lights in Detmold

Galerie Mellies presents dancing lights by Candy Bassas through October 25, 2026.

Candy Bassas presents dancing lights at Galerie Mellies in Detmold, Germany, on view from September 6 through October 25, 2026.

The Spanish painter and musician lives in Berlin, studies painting at the Universität der Künste Berlin in the class of David Schutter, and combines classical oil painting with calligraphic ink drawing and experimental techniques such as cyanotype and monotype.

In Uncertain sense of liberty, two figures stand waist-deep in water painted an acid, almost fluorescent green, speckled with points of white light. Canvases such as White carnations, Narcisus and Mimosa hang alongside black-and-white works on paper, and three of her works, among them Mimosa and White carnations, also exist as fine art prints, each in an edition of 10.

Exhibition Essay by Andreas Nitschke

Entering the gallery, it quickly becomes clear that the exhibition space here serves merely as a quiet bridge into an inner world, made fluid through painting, of dark interstices and flashing lights.

The pictures appear very basic, almost guileless along the walls. So meticulously are they thought through to the end, so much that goes unnoticed do they carry, so discreetly, so restrainedly and so exactly have the paintings of the 34-year-old been brought to completion.

Such soft power, such a restrained, quiet groove they radiate in the simplest conscientiousness of their composition, without being lesser art for it.

Happiness is sometimes found in small exhibitions, like this one on the outskirts of Detmold. In the porous, in the whirring, in the stained and the dim. In the shoreline and the wooded.

The strength of these pictures is an incorporated thoughtfulness rarely seen before, a musicality and a ringing. This questioning quality in the pictures, this flaring up, is immensely captivating. It lights a fire of interest and, at the same time, of empathy in us, and moves us to step closer. With her metaphor-saturated pictures, Candy Bassas manages to capture that very special something that sometimes only shows itself in brief moments, in flash lights.

Yet with her, the flickering lights in the pictures do not startle us the way flashbulbs would. Candy Bassas makes the light dance in her pictures.

She takes us into green-tinged, water-lily-fringed, glittering picture puzzles, and with our gaze we wade through mystically charged, soupy nature. Fully speckled with silvery-white, almost lunar points of light, with dancing shadows, indistinguishable dust particles, with golden dewdrops and pools of paint on bubbling, sulphurous pond banks.

Billowing veils of dew and hoarfrost spread across the pictures. Pinhead beads of leaf light and fireflies that bring out every furrow in the vegetation surrounding the figures more clearly. Shadowed trees detach themselves from the darkness.

Perhaps they are mangroves, perhaps firs or willows. Hard to say, for they are clouded in moisture-laden air.

People become visible. The gaze falls on a stained thicket glittering like a disco ball. On bathers who move half in the water, half standing in it, simply lingering in the nature of the pond banks to listen silently for something. In predominantly retarding scenes and pictures, the painter raises one or two figures out of a shadow in almost every one.

Candy Bassas renders all of this almost dripping with atmosphere. And despite the often momentary, sequencing manner of depiction, each picture unfolds an enormous depth. The scenes are more fictions than actual depictions.

Everything is surrounded by a faint astral shimmer, glowing bright or yellow-orange like the filaments in newfangled lumen bulbs. A tangle of flitting mirages and shadowed sun spots that falls like an impenetrable bead curtain, like a gloriole, over the overgrown, musty, sludgy and almost phosphorescent moss-green lakeshores.

The complete exhibition is a perfectly modulated miracle, a chromatic slop basin. Each picture unusually quiet and intrinsic. The show is a daydream, full of the most varied sightlines, which Candy Bassas knows how to deploy virtuosically, steering our gaze with them.

One immediately associates wisteria, embers and damp, sparks and dew. The pustules in the sky have something almost pious about them in Candy Bassas' work. These peculiar reflecting dabs of colour seem like holy, sacred flakes as they fall in a dim light onto the marshy nature, and above the thicket they look like tattoos made of shadow.

It is precisely these brightly glimmering speckles of light, almost neon green and as if reflected off tinfoil, these islands of light falling through the foliage of tendrils and ferns, that fascinate one so much in Candy Bassas' pictures and create an incredibly deep mood and atmosphere.

Through a fine handling of light and control of colour, Candy Bassas makes us believe we see floating, sparkling, reflective duckweed whirled up from the water's surface. Wooded banks full of swarming duckweed and glow-worms.

Although the wetness, the damp and the dew are only painted here, the pictures set off a flood of thoughts that is second to none. One thinks of the Everglades, of the bayou of New Orleans overgrown with swampy bougainvillea. But perhaps Candy Bassas was also thinking of the Guadalquivir, biographically much closer to her, of the Spanish marshland.

In any case, we suddenly see water striders, leeches and trees overgrown with Spanish moss. In a sparkling, flickering continuum of day and night we believe we perceive rising marsh gas or whirring mosquitoes. A blazing heat of sweat, autumnal reed grass, streaks of mist and veils of hoarfrost. A scattering nimbus that streams toward one out of the overgrown bankside brush.

Candy Bassas' pictures disintegrate in the light. They are literally flambéed by the seething colours, as if one were inside the melting interior of a painterly energy, a glowing core that, with every spark, always gives off a great deal of warmth.

The figures wade like a creeper through this shimmering twilight and the sprawling, misty vegetation. And they are at the same time luminous. They appear as if perforated. Luminescently shimmering. Enchanted ones. Glowing ones. Lulled-to-sleep ones. Who threaten to drown in splashing and seeping waters of coloured solitude.

By painting her figures in states of suspension that are hard to interpret, Candy Bassas lends them a barely graspable, atmospherically dense mood of light, marked by great calm. A world unfolds in the green thicket, a stretched time that arrives on quiet soles and in secret order. In the exhibition "dancing lights", many questions seem to call for an answer.

Her pictures confront one with a riddle. And in these strangely clinging pictures, which can be read like half-truths, one gropes somnambulantly in the dark. Then, at some point, one thinks, the truth comes, as a figured, aestheticized human body, wreathed in coloured aureoles, like apparitions, in the truest sense of the word, to light.

Into the light. Spherically uncovered by the many points of light, brought to the surface. And they take shape out of the piercing colours, out of Candy Bassas' impressionistic gaze.

Like a whisper one listens after. And the human being, the body, nevertheless remains hidden within itself.

The exhibition presents itself to us as a realm of colour made of vibrating picture puzzles and silhouettes. They are dimly beautiful psychological studies of the human being within a wild and untamed nature. More visual clues than pictures. It is an intrinsic painting that deliberately puts the obvious last and radiates great intimacy, often almost bitter-seeming feelings. A highly personal painting. Without sliding into flat self-display, Candy Bassas makes herself disappear within it.

Trust in nature, the transfer into an allegorical nature, into a growing and emerging nature that, in a kind of metabolism, supplies energy to the standstill within the human being. That is perhaps painting per se. In the night shade of nature, Candy Bassas' pictures show how art, in its painterly, enigmatic dynamic, can pull one very smoothly into a kind of deeper water. Into the vegetatively human.

What fascinates one so immediately in the exhibition, in this languid, meditative blues on the fairy-tale shore, is precisely this cinematic, scenic storytelling painting. A rich spectrum of cryptic, almost timeless-seeming, immersive painting in light and colour.

And as viewers, in this sensitively staged exhibition of human moods, we do not find the way out, the exit from the translucent pictures. The young Spaniard holds our gaze so velvet-softly, without having to explain everything through clear messages. Something else seems to have entered the pictures in exchange. Melancholy.

In an almost devotional depiction of the kinship of soul between nature and human being. In which nature functions like a vegetative shelter. To which Candy Bassas pushes open the door with her pictures.

And what remains for us are the pictures that keep reflecting themselves, the scenes that the young Spaniard measures by whether they need to be interpreted at all in order to develop depth and maturity.

Candy Bassas places meaning in fragility. In touchability. In the fragile. And in the indistinct. This blur has a reciprocal effect. It calibrates our way of seeing and at the same time reveals, behind it, an inner attitude while painting.

And the more nebulous, the more crepuscular, diffuse and flowing the pictures are painted, and that is the paradox of it, the punchline in it, the unexpected conclusion of the exhibition "dancing lights", the more penetrating and, in an unexpected way, the more comprehensible their effect.

Text by Andreas Nitschke. Translated from the German by Catapult.