Celebrating La Mercè with Cinta Vidal, creator of the poster and Poblenou Urban District collaborator

Visual artist Cinta Vidal has designed this year’s poster for the La Mercè festivities in Barcelona, featuring an image of unsettling, impossible architectures. Her distinctive way of understanding space, perspective and gravity, developed throughout an international career, now takes on a new dimension in the La Mercè poster, a work that shares the same sensibility as the piece that previously illustrated our Poblenou Urban District Map #23 map.

Hong Kong, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Melbourne, Paris, Honolulu, London… and, of course, Barcelona. Vidal’s work has travelled through galleries, museums, art fairs and public spaces around the world, both through her exhibitions and her work as a muralist.

This international journey has its origins in a highly personal artistic language that she began developing at just 16, when she started working at the Castells i Planas Scenography Workshop, in Santa Agnès de Malanyanes. There, she learned large-scale painting techniques and the craft of painting theatre curtains and stage sets, an experience that would deeply influence the way she represents space. She later studied Illustration at the Escola Massana in Barcelona and, in 2015, presented her first solo exhibition. Since then, she has developed a career combining painting, illustration and muralism, always with a particular focus on architecture and the expressive possibilities of space.

A Very Particular Perspective

In Vidal’s work, architecture comes to life through fragmented spaces and altered perspectives; a vision through which the artist explores the different ways in which we can inhabit and perceive the same place. This distinctive perspective was already present in White landscape 3, the work Vidal selected for the cover of the Poblenou Urban District Map #23.

The piece, part of On white, an exhibition presented in Hong Kong in 2018, explores architectural spaces built from white volumes. In it, the structures appear meticulously arranged, evoking the streets and buildings of a city, while people move freely through them, defying the laws of gravity with a sense of lightness and ease.

Gravity, Perspective and Other Ways of Inhabiting Space

Several of Vidal’s major influences converge in this visual universe: Caravaggio and Vermeer, for their mastery of light; M. C. Escher, for his impossible perspectives and optical illusions; Edward Hopper, for his characters immersed in their surroundings; and the atmospheres of the worlds created by Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli.

Drawing on these influences, Vidal has developed a language of her own in which walls, ceilings and floors lose their hierarchy, allowing her characters to move naturally between different planes. It is a formal investigation into space that began on theatre stages, continued through illustration, painting and muralism, and now meets Barcelona in the midst of its celebrations.

La Mercè thus becomes her new stage, a place to articulate her personal way of looking at cities: as shared spaces  that can never be seen from a single perspective.