All posts tagged: Clara Anton

Captivating New Work at 12+1 Project from Elisa Capdevilla

March 25, 2019 Artists

One of three female artists keep these walls on lockdown right now in Sant Vicenç dels Horts, Capdevilla says she’s calling into question our classical comparisons of our own bodies to those ideals of Eurocentric sculptures and painters from centuries ago.

Elisa Capdevila. *Bodies*. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12+1 Project. Barcelona. March 2019. (photo © Clara Antón)

She says “the plaster bodies are a good analogy for the rigid canons of beauty we’re used to,” and you can see exactly what she is talking about, from many angles.

Organizers of the parent project “Contorno Urbano,” itself a grassroots run collection of public and Street Artists and their admirers, say work like this hits one of their many people-fueled goals. “We keep working every day to normalize women’s participation in Street art projects, because art belongs to all of us.”

Of all body types! Ya heard?

Flavita Banana & Women in a Springtime Dance

March 16, 2019 Artists

With a nod to La Danse by Henri Matisse and many human tribes’ rites of Spring, artist Falvita Banana creates her new “Juntes sumem” (add together) here on the façade of Cotxeres Borrell in Barcelona.

Flavita Banana. “*Juntes sumem”* Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona, Spain. (photo © Clara Anton)

Her illustrations have been in magazines, books and on public walls, often with the most basic and courageous technique at play; the simple stroke in monochrome. Humor, absurdity, melancholy all are intertwined. Here the expansive commanding of space and convivial craze infers the spirit as well as the movement of these celebrants.

But as with many of her humorous works, she says that this new wall completed Wednesday has a sadness – the clan-like closeness on display is for safety as well as intimate sisterhood.

This is a feminist ring-around-the-rosy says the artist. “At any time and situation, women have to be alert and united. We have to protect and help each other; unfortunately, even when we’re having fun,” she says of the jovial scene. “Above all, we have to remember that we are stronger together.”

Created in conjunction with the public art project Contorno Urbano in Barcelona.

Nuria Toll Paints Her “Veïnes” in Barcelona

February 16, 2019 Artists

Saturday fun today from local Barcelona graphic designer Núria Toll, who’s sort of new to the experience of doing murals and art on the street.

Translating her own history with illustration and typography, Ms. Toll finds that humor is a welcome antidote to the negativity that is produced by our invasions of animals’ natural habitats.

**Núria Toll.** *“Veïnes*”. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona. February 2019. (photo © Clara Antón)

Here with “Veïnes” (female neighbors in Catalan), her seagulls are meant to remind us that the natural world was here first, and we should make a home for all of us. The seagulls are rather good at integrating, and Toll here is giving them their due.

Núria Toll paints here for Contorno Urbano, the first foundation in Spain dedicated to street art and graffiti.

Two Writers Walk Into a Tunnel: MUSA71 x Siro in Barcelona

January 29, 2019 Artists

Part of the experience of making art in the street is the interaction with people passing by. Other times it’s about being out with your mates or peers, hitting up walls that are near each other – sharing opinions, jokes, paint. Of course when you are in your own creative zone you also may be able to block out everything; people and sounds and smells. You escape into the paint, the movement, the physicality, the shapes and colors.

MUSA. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona. January 2019. (photo © Clara Anton)

This month Musa71 and Siro hit a tunnel together in in Rafael Casanova in Barcelona, each painting their own piece. They say they liked it and today we have pictures from their dual project – which turned into a friendly competition.

Writing graffiti since ’89, Barcelona local Musa71 says she’s a self-taught artist who is passionate about the letterform and exploring a number of styles just to get an appreciation for ways to manipulate them while keeping them legible.

Galicia born Siro studied fine arts over the last four years here in Barcelona and he says that he spends a lot of time painting and tattooing.

“After 10 years of painting, I think I have already turned this habit of painting into my little shelter, into an escape route from all the rest,” he says in a press release. He wouldn’t be the first to admit to developing an addiction to graffiti and mural making – we’ve met many.

It’s good to see how these two artists work have some overlap – at least here in this tunnel in Barcelona.

SIRO. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona. January 2019. (photo © Clara Anton)

Sant Vicenç dels Horts is a two-artist intervention courtesy of the Contorno Urbano Project. To learn more please go here:

Anna Taratiel and The Maps Inside of You

January 19, 2019 Artists

Geometric and organic compliment one another here in “Perspectivas y Vacíos” (Perspectives and Gaps) in this new public art by Anna Tartiel in the Centre Cívic Cotxeres Borrell in the center of Barcelona.

Part of the program 12 + 1 by Contorno Urbano, this piece of work is part of a public initiative started four years ago that brings “urban art closer to people, breaking with the stereotypes and prejudices that surround this artistic expression.” In fact this kind of work and initiative occupies a rare space in cities; largely untouched by bureaucratic obstacles and corporate lust for invasion of the civic discourse with commercials – mediated by a thoughtful community-based committee of organizers.

Anna Taratiel. “*Perspectivas y vacío*s” Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona, January 2019. (photo © Clara Anton)

An artist with a street practice as well as a studio practice, Tartiel brings her fascination with internal maps externally, her aesthetic perspective of her own city with its precise lines and imperfections, evoking a Barcelona “full of geometry and movement,” she says. She has also described her work in the past as a sort of internal cartography, a depiction of the maps that we each carry around inside.

Graffiti and Street Art researcher/educator Javier Abarca wrote of her work two years ago for a show she was exhibiting entitled “Antipodas” and his description of the matters at play in her work and practice is helpful to understand how she got here on this wall as well.

“Taratiel says that once she had gone in for geometric painting she started to miss the warmth of the organic and the random, a concern that is common among artists who move from the street to canvas and which stems from an essential difference between these two work spaces,” he writes. “If canvas is a blank, inert space that the artist has to fill from scratch, the street is a motley scenario full of meanings. In the street the artist is limited to proposing, and it is the city that gives shape to that proposal by the accumulated effect of many factors.”

In this case it is a defined canvas on the street, not a raw neglected wall in a marginal sector of the city. It is a challenge of blending these competing impulses and finding where they overlap, perhaps. This may depend on your perspective.

Ampparito Conceptualizes a Digital Solution to an Urban Planner Jam

January 5, 2019 Artists

Talented urban planning that has sufficient vision for the future will anticipate the needs and behaviors of a city, looking forward to its growth and reconfigurations over time. In L’Hospitalet, Spain the Street Artist Ampparito gathered plenty of evidence that sometimes old solutions in the built environment have to be destroyed in order for the new needs of an evolving city.

Before and after. A virtual surgical solution for urban impediments from Ampparito (©Ampparito)

The resulting new mural is a humorous merging of digital and mortar, a conceptual piece that imagines the erasing of walls of an urban design/engineering mess in the way a Photoshop designer may do it – without heavy equipment, traffic disruption and no environmentally toxic by-products.

Esteban Marin tells us of the 10 day residency that the Spanish urban interventionist took part in with Contorno Urbano to study the mural site, work with neighbors and students from the area to discuss the needs of the people, and the bold outcome that Marin ironically calls “ground-breaking.”

Ampparito. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona. November 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

The meeting place of a rail line and a road that once served the communities that grew up around it, everyone agrees that it now divides it and impedes a freeflow of traffic and people. It is something that a practitioner of Chinese medicine or its various healing modalities (acupuncture, Qigong, Tai Chi) may describe as an interruption of energetic pathways, a blockage of Qi energy. In the parlance of urban designers and civil engineers it would be similar; rebalancing urban mobility.

Ampparito and a group of students study obstacles and erasure. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona. November 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

“The wall must be destroyed and rail tracks moved underground to facilitate the flow between districts,” says Marin. “Right now the road where the wall is cuts the city in two, same as the rail track. This is a crossroad point on the city with a lot of obstacles for the people living nearby to move around freely.”

“The spot where I had to work was a concrete wall that works as a base for the railway,” explains Ampparito. “Sometime ago this track was perpendicularly crossed by other trains. At some point this old transport disappeared and a road was built in order to connect the two main parts of Hospitalet. It is poetic how this tracks and roads split the village in several parts, making hard to connect two adjoining places.”

Although he may have liked to create an image that provided an emotional healing or comfort, the artist says that a decorative or aesthetically pleasing design wouldn’t have answered the calls from the community.

Ampparito. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona. November 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

“I didn’t want to sweeten this place,” he says, remarking that most people simply drive past it. “It’s so hard to appreciate anything in this non place,” he says. “No one stops here. “Cars go through quite fast and there is no way to hang out here.”

Why not simply select your Photoshop tool from the toolbox and erase the obstruction? That’s what students helped Amparitto decide during his workshops with them to study the issue and devise solutions. An ingenious solution that speaks to the difference between digital work and actual labor, it also may not translate as clearly to older generations or those not familiar with design software, but it packs a visual punch that makes you crack a smile regardless.

“While you stand there in between cars going fast so close,” says Ampparito, “it all will make a bit of sense.”

Ampparito. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona. November 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Etnik Decontructs and Grows Acanto Leaves in Barcelona

January 3, 2019 Artists

Etnik continues his deconstructivist investigations, drawing upon his history as a graffiti writer and a student of architecture, on this new wall in Barcelona. An illustrator and toy designer in addition to graffiti writer and muralist, you can see his appreciation for letter writing and the dimensional forms of geometry in almost all his work. He says that he is always searching for new ways to push the limits of classical graffiti to a higher level.

Etnik. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona. October 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Born in Stockholm and living in Torino, Etnik feels right at home on the street of many cities and the dense, designed, deliberate defining of the man-made environment. What is new here is the inclusion of a leaf motif, imperfectly biomorphic, a visual paean to the natural world that precedes us and will outlast every cityscape we devise.

‘The wall is a colored series of Acanto leaves combined with some geometric architectonic elements in white,” he says. “The composition is a dualism between natural energies. The acanto leaf represents nature and its also a symbol you’ll frequently see in painting and classical architecture throughout the history of art.”

Etnik. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona. October 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

To learn about the Contorno Urbano Foundation and it’s 12 + 1 Project, please click HERE.

Ivan Floro “Sacred Waters” for Kumbh Mela in Barcelona

December 1, 2018 Artists

Sacred Waters | पवित्र पानी

The Ganga and Godavari rivers feature the largest gathering of humanity every three years when literally tens of millions of visitors bathe in them peacefully and reverentially, in accordance with Hindu tradition for Kumbh Mela. People join religious discussion, sing, and see some of the most revered holy men and holy women there.

Import it to Barcelona, Spain and this image feels out of context. The sadhu (or saddhu) is a religious monk – a sacred holy man in India. But how did he get here for the month of November?

Ivan Floro. “Sacred Waters”. Contorno Urbano Foundation/12 + 1 Project. Barcelona, Spain. (photo © Clara Antón)

Artist Ivan Floro says he was considering the Hindu lights festival Diwali and the holy practice of bathing when he was creating his wall for the Centre Cívic Cotxeres Borrell. He calls it “Sacred Waters | पवित्र पानी” and his academic interpretation of his work is an evolution from his graffiti work as kid spraying abandoned factories. Now he studies the old European master painters and those traditions, bringing to fore this powerful piece that may be confusing to some who don’t know about the bathing holy practice thousands of miles from Barcelona.

“I thought about the clash of cultures there is between East and West,” he says, “how they understand life and death. We celebrate some of their rituals, but we could be shocked buy some others”.

Ivan Floro. “Sacred Waters”. Contorno Urbano Foundation/12 + 1 Project. Barcelona, Spain. (photo © Clara Antón)

This wall was produced with the Contorno Urbano Foundation – 12 + 1 Project.

Lily Brik Is Romantic for Childhood Stories in Barcelona

November 13, 2018 Artists

Lleida, Catalunya-based illustrator and muralist Lily Brik goes for the romantic, the emotional, and traditional language and imagery in her commercial work as well as on festival walls. Here in Barcelona she returns to some of the familiar fairy tale tropes that many a girl associates with the stories of her childhood. Uncritical in its sentiment, Ms Brik says that this is deliberate decision to return back to a place of safety.

“Usually people paint during the childhood, but they forget about it once they grow up,” she says. “Luckily, it stayed in my mind. Painting has always been my favorite way to express myself, the way of explaining what I couldn’t say through words”.

Bisual’s Trippy Interlude with Drug Culture in Barcelona

October 16, 2018 Artists

BISUAL’s post-human sallow skinned characters are laboratory inventions that contain elements of animal, chemical, organic, electronic, psychedelic – minus the superpowers or sleekness of your typical cyborg. They also like to smoke something now and then while gazing at phones in a cartoon dystopia, a handful of helpers to mellow the menacing low-level paranoia.

The illustrator and painter has a history with graffiti as well, which may explain his ease creating casually comic surrealities on large walls in public space, like this new one in Barcelona.

The mural features leaves of the Acanthus mollis, a common and invasive species of plant, creeping up onto the street, blended with “geometric architectonic elements” he says. The pinkish protagonist may be pausing on his way to an errand at the liquor store, or he may just be waiting for his man, €26 euros in his hand. Certainly those psycheldelio creatures from the organic wild who are slithering with wide eyes slowly up to him are attentive to his actions, perhaps listening to his words. Not that he should be concerned of course.

Bisual’s wall is sponsored by the Contorno Urban0 12 + 1 Project, a community powered initiative to bring artists to walls in Barcelona.

Illustrator PERRINE HONORÉ Simply Cheerful on Torrassa in Barcelona

August 11, 2018 Artists

As you know the influence of the Memphis design movement is again fully present as the spirit of the 1980s Milanese architect and designer Ettore Sottass has captured the imagination of many young creatives who have tired of mid-century modern.

Perrine Honoré. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Torrassa, Hospitalet de Llobregat. Barcelona. August 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

French illustrator, graphic designer and mural artist Perrine Honoré fills her days with drawing figures, flora, and scenes of domestic simplicity with the same panache of those early Memphis designers who valued form over function, played with proportion, and stacked striped, dotted, saturated pop colored geometric shapes adjacent to and on top of one another.

Perrine Honoré. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Torrassa, Hospitalet de Llobregat. Barcelona. August 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

The style and world view is a frank form of communicating the complexities of life and relationships without the guile or intrigue, and certain audiences are responding positively to a sort of naïve optimism amidst the chaotic, often negative, news cycle that dominates discourse at the moment.

During August at the open-air art gallery called 12 + 1 in Barcelona, Honoré paints her cheerful vision in “El Barrio” (Torrassa). “Between abstraction and illustration, the idea is to leave the public free to interpret the work as they wish,” she says in a typical show of spontaneity.

Perrine Honoré. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Torrassa, Hospitalet de Llobregat. Barcelona. August 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

With formal training in Sweden, Paris, and Barcelona in Fashion Design, graphic design, and illustration, her lines are confident and precisely curvilinear, with a degree of playful insouciance.

Guess it is time to relax, right? – most of Europe is on holiday right now anyway.

Perrine Honoré. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Torrassa, Hospitalet de Llobregat. Barcelona. August 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Check out Perrine Honoré’s recent exhibition “Intimidad Simbiótica” in the gallery @miscelaneabcn and her video tour on Instagram

Learn more about the Contorno Urbano Foundation and their 12 + 1 Project here.

Joan Cabrer. “Hot Pixel” Digitizes Life and Nature For Contorno Urbano. 12+1 Project

June 16, 2018 Artists

Painting on the street and the field of painting. The color field. Your field of reference.

Joan Cabrer is pixelating the artificial and the natural, placing them on the same playing field.

Winner of the Sotheby’s Scholarship Medal given by the Miró Foundation and participant in a number of artists residencies and gallery exhibitions since the start of his artist career a little over a decade ago, Cabrer can be seen as being from a certain generation that became romantically involved with the early years of our digital aesthetics formed from the mid 1980s to the late 1990s.

Those simplistic blocked screen renderings of the world were friendly, alien, and reductive; instantly futuristic in our imaginations. At first graphic, now more painterly, his works now freely associate with the bio-scientific – static representations of flickering life and ecosystem.

Here for his new mural created for Contorno Urbano’s 12+1 project in Barcelona, Cabrer toys with the “glitch” factor that roughly distorts, then returns us to a normality within our altered virtual reality. What point does digital mixed so often and so thoroughly that we can’t imagine the real with the virtual?

“In this series that I’ve been working on the technological references abound. They shows how the digital mutation interacts with references that belong to the organic world,” he says. “The nature observed from a scientific point of view is mixed with digital aesthetics.”

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Before and after. A virtual surgical solution for urban impediments from Ampparito (©Ampparito)

Ampparito. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona. November 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Ampparito and a group of students study obstacles and erasure. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona. November 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Ampparito. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona. November 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Ampparito. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona. November 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Etnik. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona. October 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Etnik. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona. October 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Etnik. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona. October 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Etnik. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona. October 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Sacred Waters | पवित्र पानी

Ivan Floro. “Sacred Waters”. Contorno Urbano Foundation/12 + 1 Project. Barcelona, Spain. (photo © Clara Antón)

Ivan Floro. “Sacred Waters”. Contorno Urbano Foundation/12 + 1 Project. Barcelona, Spain. (photo © Clara Antón)

Ivan Floro. “Sacred Waters”. Contorno Urbano Foundation/12 + 1 Project. Barcelona, Spain. (photo © Clara Antón)

Lily Brik. Contorno Urbano. Project 12 + 1. l’Hospitalet de Llobregat. November 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Lily Brik. Contorno Urbano. Project 12 + 1. l’Hospitalet de Llobregat. November 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Lily Brik. Contorno Urbano. Project 12 + 1. l’Hospitalet de Llobregat. November 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Lily Brik. Contorno Urbano. Project 12 + 1. l’Hospitalet de Llobregat. November 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Bisual. Contorno Urbano Foundation / 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona. Ocotober 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Bisual. Contorno Urbano Foundation / 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona. Ocotober 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Bisual. Contorno Urbano Foundation / 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona. Ocotober 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Bisual. Detail. Contorno Urbano Foundation / 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona. Ocotober 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Bisual. Contorno Urbano Foundation / 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona. Ocotober 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Images from Bisual’s Instagram (© Jay Bisual)

Perrine Honoré. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Torrassa, Hospitalet de Llobregat. Barcelona. August 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Perrine Honoré. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Torrassa, Hospitalet de Llobregat. Barcelona. August 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Perrine Honoré. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Torrassa, Hospitalet de Llobregat. Barcelona. August 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Perrine Honoré. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Torrassa, Hospitalet de Llobregat. Barcelona. August 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Perrine Honoré. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Torrassa, Hospitalet de Llobregat. Barcelona. August 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Joan Cabrer. “Hot Pixel”. Contorno Urbano. Project 12 + 1. l’Hospitalet de Llobregat. June 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Joan Cabrer. “Hot Pixel”. Contorno Urbano. Project 12 + 1. l’Hospitalet de Llobregat. June 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Joan Cabrer. “Hot Pixel”. Contorno Urbano. Project 12 + 1. l’Hospitalet de Llobregat. June 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Joan Cabrer. “Hot Pixel”. Contorno Urbano. Project 12 + 1. l’Hospitalet de Llobregat. June 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

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