The olive tree does not flower. It grows in harsh, stony ground, battered by wind and salt, and yet it endures —century after century— as one of the most charged symbols of the Mediterranean world. When Miquel Costa i Llobera wrote El Pi de Formentor, his declaration of love for the nature of Mallorca, he was not merely describing a landscape. He was articulating a way of belonging to a place: one built not on possession, but on deep, patient attention.

Més vell que l'olivera takes its title from that poem and its spirit from the same impulse. During their residency at CCA Andratx, Tania Alvarez and Anna Ortiz wandered through the island —its paths, its light, its stone— gathering images, impressions, fragments. Back in the studio, they painted from these traces: not the direct transcription of a landscape, but its reconstruction through memory and imagination. The ten works that make up this exhibition are small in scale and large in presence: intimate objects that ask to the approached, held close, read slowly.

For Anna Ortiz, the landscape becomes a field of pure chromatic sensation. Working from photographs and recollection, her palette opens into registers that feel less observed than absorbed — deep nocturnal blues, the scorched oranges of a valley at midday, the dense, almost subaqueous green of botanical matter. Her paintings do not document the land so much as metabolize it, distilling place into feeling, the seen into the sensed.

Tania Alvarez moves between the natural and the built, finding in the vernacular architecture of Andratx —its arched thresholds, pink facades, stone walls, tiled interiors— the same stubborn endurance the poem finds in the pine. She paints walls that hold heat, floors worn by footfall, doorways that frame a world just out of reach. Her canvases carry an anthropological tenderness: these are not merely structures with a practical function, but containers of time, of gesture, of lives partially glimpsed — sensed through texture, shadow, the particular angle of afternoon light.

Together, the works trace the space between observation and imagination. To paint a place, they suggest, is also —inevitably— to make it yours.

Tania Alvarez (1983 Sevilla, Spain) lives and works in Catskill, NY. She holds an MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2017 and a BFA from Pratt Institute in 2005. Recent solo exhibitions include Through Painted Panes, CHART Gallery, NY, New York (2024); and P.O.V., Miriam Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2020). Recent group exhibitions include The Golden Thread: A Fiber Art Show, Bravin Lee Programs, New York, NY (2024); P(re)view, Galeria Belard, Lisbon, Portugal (2023); Interlude: A Five Year Residency Retrospective, The James Castle House, Boise, ID (2023); Home Works, CHART Gallery, New York, NY (2023); Dwelling, White Columns, New York, NY (2023); McNay Print Fair, McNay Museum, San Antonio, Tx (2023); Inside Out, Scroll Gallery, New York, NY (2022); Rostro, Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2022); and Nice Work 2, Sulk Gallery, Chicago, IL (2022) among others. She is a three-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, and was an artist-in-residence at the James Castle House in Boise, ID; The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation in New Berlin, NY; The Studios at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA; and the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China. Alvarez’s works are in the permanent collections of the University Art Museum at the University at Albany and the Boise City Department of Arts and History in Boise, Idaho.

Anna Ortiz is a Mexican-American painter living in Brooklyn. Ortiz is a recipient of the 2024 NYFA Artist Fellowship. Ortiz has had solo exhibitions with Mindy Solomon Gallery, Deanna Evans Projects and Dinner Gallery. She has shown her work with 1969 Gallery, Johansson Projects and Monya Rowe. She has also exhibited internationally, at the CAN Art Fair in Ibiza in Mexico City with MAIA and in London with Soho Revue. Her work has been featured in Art Forum, Maake Magazine and Colossal. She has been the recipient of various residencies including Yaddo, CCA in Mallorca and The Golden Foundation. She currently holds the McMillan/Stewart Endowed Chair Fellowship; a yearlong visiting artist position at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Text by Esma Derdour