Permed Realities: Charlie Smits Turns Madrid into a Queer Aesthetic Lab
There’s a moment, somewhere between the smell of peroxide and the soft drone of a hairdryer, when time stops playing by the rules. That suspended, fluorescent-lit hush — equal parts anticipation, vanity and reinvention — is exactly where artist Charlie Smits has decided to build his latest universe. Beauty Salon, his new exhibition in Madrid, isn’t just an art show. It’s a shapeshifting habitat where desire gets styled, identity gets chemically processed, and the mirror stops being a witness and starts being a co-conspirator.
Charlie has always possessed a talent for building worlds that feel like they’ve been assembled out of pop iconography, queer lore and the aftermath of a particularly glamorous fever dream. But Beauty Salon pushes this instinct to its limit, turning the familiar choreography of a beauty appointment into a full-scale aesthetic mythology. Across 26 one-of-a-kind pieces — ranging from resin panels to digital works, ceramics and textiles — the artist constructs a visual language that refuses to sit quietly on a wall. Each piece vibrates with its own internal logic, its own coded glamour, its own mutated personality, creating an ecosystem where transformation is the only rule.
At the core of this world is the salon itself: a place where people come to alter the way they’re seen and, in the process, the way they see themselves. In the exhibition text, the salon becomes a site where “chrononormativity is suspended… places where time is challenged, stopped and molded.”
Here, the body isn’t fixed matter — it’s raw material, pliable and charged with possibility. Smits seizes this idea and stretches it to its most fantastical edges, populating his salon with posthuman characters whose features are softened, sharpened, elongated or adorned with a sense of camp so unapologetic it feels like a manifesto.
The camp sensibility is central — not as aesthetic garnish, but as a method of world-building. Smits leans into exaggeration, fragmentation and the playful grotesque, crafting figures that feel like icons of a beauty culture that never existed but absolutely should have. This is glamour as glitch, beauty as performance art, identity as something you slick back, curl, bleach or lacquer into existence. His characters become avatars of transformation itself, holding “multiple layers of narrative” within their invented, hermetic visual language.
One of the exhibition’s most arresting gestures is the collaboration with Nim Salón, a celebrated Madrid hair studio. Six sculptural masks have been treated, dyed and styled by professional hairdressers, merging the techniques of high-end beauty work with Smits’s visual vocabulary. The result is both unsettling and irresistible — part fashion editorial, part shamanic relic — reinforcing the show’s fixation on the body as a site of ritual, fantasy and aesthetic engineering. These masks aren’t passive objects; they feel like they’re waiting for their appointment to begin.
There’s an unmistakable queerness running through Beauty Salon, not only in its embrace of artifice but in the way it reimagines the salon as a sanctuary. The exhibition text speaks of these beauty spaces as “refuge for the queer community… where rules are reinvented and the binary gets dismantled through the practice of care and transformation.”
Smits captures that atmosphere — the mix of mischief, vulnerability and bravado that blooms where identity can be tried on, adjusted, or deliberately overdone. His universe is a tribute to becoming, to shedding skins, to the messy and electrifying process of crafting the self.
Even the exclusive merchandising created for the show riffs on this idea of democratized transformation, letting viewers take home fragments of the world he’s built — collectibles that feel more like talismans than souvenirs.
Hosted at Espacio OHM, a creative hub committed to cross-disciplinary experimentation, Beauty Salon feels like the perfect end-of-year ritual for Madrid’s art scene — an act of collective reinvention disguised as an exhibition. Smits, who has shown in Amsterdam, Berlin, Valencia, Almería and beyond, continues to distill his characteristic blend of pop weirdness, emotional intensity and queer futurism into increasingly polished — yet defiantly unruly — forms.
Ultimately, Beauty Salon is less about vanity than about volatility: the thrill of watching an identity melt, reform, and come out shimmering on the other side. In Smits’s hands, beauty isn’t about perfection. It’s about becoming — fabulously, excessively, relentlessly becoming.
You can book your own appointment at Espacio OHM through 20 December, stepping into a salon that doesn’t just promise a new look, but an entirely new universe.
Images by Mario Palace
