Previous altell il·lustrat artists

The Altell Il·lustrat (Illustrated Mezzanine) opened in April 2016. Since then it has changed its look twice a year, around the time of the Sant Jordi and La Mercè celebrations. Both established professionals and Barcelona illustration newcomers show off their talent there.

Pau Gasol and Carles Murillo

April 2019 - September 2019

Literature against the wall

The March 2019 Illustrated Mezzanine features a tribute to Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's book Barcelones based on the illustrations and excerpts of text reprinted by Barcelona City Council in 2018. The mural was created by the designer Carles Murillo and the illustrator Pau Gasol who, after studying Vázquez Montalbán's work in depth, concluded that it would be difficult for any attempt at reinterpretation or restructuring to be faithful to the spirit of the book. This is why they chose to show rather than to reinterpret.

The two authors decided to uphold the validity of the Barcelones reprint and pay tribute to the book as a physical object. Thus, both the paper and the book itself (as its physical support) are present, making up the mural together with the illustrations and the text. The illustrations are from the book, the pages are placed one on top of the other and the texts are displayed in a free, fragmented way, in different sizes and with no logical or chronological reading order. The result is a collage of illustrated excerpts and stories.

Lu_J_son

September 2018

Tomás Langarita is an artist from Zaragoza who works under the pseudonym of Lu_J_son. Now a Barcelona city dweller, Tomás studied Fine Arts at the University of Salamanca, specialising in sculpture. Yet it was in Barcelona that he connected with his vocation for painting and where he started to create large-format acrylic works.

Lu_J_son’s work is borne of his admiration for minimalism, pop art, cubism and abstract expressionism, influences which live and breathe in the shapes and forms of his paintings and illustrations. The tessellation and thick lines of his work allow shapes to emerge which the observer can decipher, with a visual impact deriving from its schematic force. His work oozes with architectural meaning, combined with the strength of flat colours, carrying the spectator away to place where time stands still.

Lalalimola

April 2018 - September 2018

Lalalimola is the pseudonym of Valencian illustrator Sandra Navarro. She began her career in the advertising and graphic design sector, and years later she reoriented her career towards illustration, her vocation.

Since then, she has developed projects for the publishing, literary and advertising sectors, both nationally and internationally. Among her works is the poster for the forthcoming Valencia Book Fair, editorial illustrations for Scoop Magazine and El País, picture books for Penguin Random House and Oxford University Press, and other illustrations for UNICEF and Santillana.

With a simple, spontaneous and fresh style, the work of Lalalimola is characterised by its sensitivity, dynamism and a touch of humour. Her drawings evoke the spirit of classic illustrations of the fifties. Strokes transform urban landscapes into narrative stages to weave stories between diverse, everyday characters. Lalalimola's illustrations take shape and appear before the eyes of the public to reveal our deepest emotions.