María Cortés presents La Travesía del Leopardo in Madrid, a new exhibition that will run until 28 May 2026 at The Robin Blue House, 3 Justiniano Street. The exhibition brings together eight paintings created between 2024 and 2026 and offers a pictorial journey through landscapes where the visible opens up to a more intimate dimension: that of memory, intuition and contemplation.
In this series, the leopard appears as a silent presence. Sometimes visible, at other times barely hinted at, it does not function as a literal animal, but as a symbol of an inner energy that bursts into spaces of apparent calm. Tennis courts, swimming pools, terraces, lakes and architecture become settings suspended between the everyday and the dreamlike, where nature engages in dialogue with architecture and the wild enters the domestic sphere.
Cortés’s work stems from a deliberate, almost meditative gaze. Her images do not arise from rigid planning, but from a sensation that lingers and matures before reaching the canvas. “I need the image to stay with me for a while. It almost always arises from an inner sensation: a light, a landscape, a colour or an emotion that appears very intuitively,” explains the artist.
This introspective dimension runs through the entire exhibition. For Cortés, the creative process is closely linked to meditation and a form of inner listening. “I rely heavily on meditation in my creative process and, for me, painting is a way of connecting with something deeper. Painting brings me peace; it is a space of silence and contemplation where I can transform emotions and memories into atmospheres,” she explains.
On her canvases, action is contained and presence takes centre stage. The artist avoids immediate explanation and seeks to ensure that each work retains an element of mystery. “When I start painting, I almost enter a meditative state. There, the work begins to reveal itself little by little, in a very organic way. I’m never interested in explaining everything straight away; I prefer the painting to retain its mystery and allow the viewer to enter it through their own sensibility,” she says.
Colour occupies a central place in her artistic language. More than an aesthetic tool, Cortés sees it as a form of emotion and energy. “I often start a painting precisely with a combination of colours that evokes a certain feeling in me even before I think about the composition,” he notes. Soft lavenders, buttery yellows, watery blues and coral pinks create atmospheres of calm, desire, mystery and suspended time.
Through colour, the artist transforms the landscape into an emotional experience. “I am interested in colour’s ability to transform a landscape into an inner state. Through it, I try to create atmospheres that convey calm, mystery, desire or even a certain sense of being suspended in time,” explains Cortés. This chromatic vibration, somewhere between the intuitive and the spiritual, becomes one of the key elements of the exhibition.
Works such as The Panther and the Tennis Court, The Pink Moon and the Leopard, The Leopard and the Swimming Pool, Off the Wall, Come Closer, Slowly and On the Wall propose a shift that is not geographical, but sensory. The journey moves from the exterior to the interior, from the visible to the suggested. In The Panther and the Tennis Court, the geometry of the game coexists with the fluid presence of the animal; in The Leopard and the Swimming Pool, water acts as a threshold between nature and architecture; and in On the Wall, the wild finally enters the domestic space.
Coming from a family with links to art and antiques, María Cortés grew up surrounded by objects steeped in history. That visual heritage has profoundly shaped her understanding of beauty. “From a very young age, I learnt to observe beauty not only in great works of art, but also in the details: a patina, a light, a composition, or the sensibility conveyed by an antique object,” she recalls.
Although her pictorial language is contemporary, this aesthetic memory remains in her paintings through a quest for harmony, emotion and timelessness. “I think it has given me a very intuitive relationship with harmony, colour and contemplation, but also a great respect for the sensitivity and emotion that a work can contain,” adds the artist.
Born in Madrid in 1972, María Cortés has a career linked to art across various fields. Co-founder of the magazine MAS ARTE, associated with international galleries such as Coll & Cortés and Colnaghi, and at the helm of María Cortés Fine Art Consultancy, she has developed a refined visual sensibility that translates into serene, symbolic and deeply emotional painting. Her works form part of private collections in Spain, the United States, Brazil, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.
With La Travesía del Leopardo, Cortés consolidates a pictorial universe in which the landscape ceases to be an external place and becomes an inner territory. An exhibition conceived as an invitation to look slowly, to pause before beauty and to recognise, in the stillness of each scene, the silent power of intuition.
