Artistic Paradise José Manuel Ballester, born in Madrid in 1960, is a master at juggling concrete and iron, light and space. Discreetly dipped in tinted light, his scenes are transformed into graphic constructions, abolishing the border between the photographic and the painted. Whether theater, factory or apartment building, Ballester’s nascent architectural structures are reflections about absence and the progress of time. Structure, color and lighting arrive thereby in symbiosis with the notion of newly defining aesthetic emptiness. The self-conscious melting from