Fran Baena (b. 1999, Priego de Córdoba) holds a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Granada and an MA in Interdisciplinary Artistic Production from the University of Málaga. His painting practice is driven by a commitment to making sense of the present, bringing together existential crisis and irony. His creative process revolves around mischief in all its forms, subverting conventional image-reading codes and reflecting on how images are consumed on social media and how they impact the art field itself.

Working with self-imposed limitations that echo growing up amid ongoing economic crises and precarity, he uses tools such as Instagram Stories’ drawing function instead of Adobe Photoshop or other, more fully equipped software. He imitates digital painting by translating it into physical form and setting it against classical techniques like egg tempera or large-scale formats, which historically were reserved for depicting major events. In this way, painting becomes a medium through which memes are treated with care, slowness and respect, gradually revealing the social issues that lie behind the easy laugh and their apparent banality.