There are gestures that transcend the artistic and become testimony.
In the summer of 2025, Salamanca witnessed one of them with the opening of the exhibition Talent Has No Age, organised by the CENIE and the General Foundation of the University of Salamanca, in collaboration with the Economic and Social Council of Portugal and the Polytechnic Institute of Bragança.
The exhibition brought together 23 unpublished works created ex profeso by Félix Martín – Felmart (San Martín del Castañar, 1933). At 92, the artist — who never interrupted his lifelong dialogue with painting — conceived this collection with the same curiosity that has guided him throughout his life: not to revisit the past, but to affirm the present.
Each canvas was created specifically for this exhibition, and that decision turns it into more than a cultural event: it becomes a declaration of relevance.
Felmart, with nine decades behind him, does not illustrate the message of the exhibition — he embodies it. His work shows that longevity is not a time to be endured, but a space to be inhabited with creative fullness.
Longevity as a creative act
The works in Talent Has No Age are not a nostalgic review but a contemporary exploration of memory, matter and light.
In them, age does not appear as a theme: it appears as a method.
Felmart paints with the serenity of someone who no longer competes with time and, precisely for that reason, masters it. The paintings — vessels, bicycles, flowers, pantries — turn the everyday into a symbol of continuity. The colours, deep and earthy, blend with luminous tones that seem to emerge from experience.
Each work is imbued with the present: the voice of an artist who, far from repeating himself, continues searching. As one visitor put it, “this is not an exhibition about the passage of time, but about how to keep filling it.”
That is the heart of the project: to show that talent, like life, does not fade — it transforms.
Art as a biography of time
Through his work, Félix Felmart offers a biography in colour of human maturity.
His paintings neither idealise youth nor mythologise old age: they inhabit a deeper territory — that of fullness. Each stroke is the result of a long life of observation, learning and patience; each texture condenses decades of craft and vision.
This exhibition does not merely display longevity: it celebrates it as a form of wisdom.
In Felmart’s trajectory, art and life merge into a quiet lesson: that time, when lived with curiosity, can become the most fertile raw material for creation.
A manifesto in images
Talent Has No Age resonates with the mission of the CENIE: to transform society’s perception of ageing and place longevity at the centre of culture.
The artist himself, through his example, embodies the principle of Conscious Longevity: living long time with meaning, purpose and creativity.
The works in this exhibition — conceived expressly for it — are a perfect metaphor for that purpose.
Felmart set himself the challenge of working with new materials, of facing the uncertainty of each blank canvas.
His decision to create from maturity — rather than exhibit retrospectives — turns the exhibition into a lesson in the present.
The artist’s gesture encapsulates what the CENIE has promoted since its inception: a society in which older people remain active protagonists of knowledge, culture and innovation.
Memory and future
Walking through the exhibition, installed at the International Spanish Centre of the University of Salamanca, feels like a conversation between past and future.
The visitor does not encounter a museum of memories, but a laboratory of vitality.
The everyday objects depicted — a table, a flower, a tool — serve as pretexts to speak of the permanence of what is essential, the dignity of manual work, and time as craftsmanship.
In this dialogue between memory and creation lies the true meaning of longevity: not living more years, but living them with a renewed gaze.
Felmart demonstrates it with every painting: to keep creating is to keep being.
A legacy that inspires
Talent Has No Age transcends its condition as an exhibition to become a cultural manifesto.
At a time when society tends to measure value by youth or speed, the work of a nonagenarian artist arrives as a luminous reminder: maturity is a fertile territory for beauty, thought and innovation.
The exhibition also forms part of the CENIE’s line of work that brings together art, science and citizenship, showing that longevity is not only studied — it is also represented and felt.
Art, like life, reaches its fullness when it is shared.
For this reason, the exhibition holds an essential place among the Highlights of 2025: because it encapsulates, with unique poetic strength, what the CENIE defends in all its projects — that time, when well lived, does not extinguish talent, but illuminates it in a different way.