Enric Font spent twenty years producing work in his studio before deciding, in 2014, to enter the world of urban art and bring his practice into public space. His work spans multiple formats, including digital and paper illustration, graphic design, artistic murals, painted shutters, and storytelling. His style is characterized by the incorporation of graphic elements. Today, Enric combines his artistic production with teaching positions at the Faculty of Education of the University of Barcelona, EINA University Centre of Design and Art, and the Open University of Catalonia (UOC).
You began your artistic career as an illustrator and painter working in a studio, and it was not until 2014 that you started painting in the street. What pushed you toward the world of urban art?
It was a post-economic-crisis context. After years of painting in the studio and while writing a doctoral thesis on the relationship between popular visual culture and contemporary painting, I found myself interviewing artists such as Sixe Paredes, Spogo, Werens, and Txiqui Trepax. I realized they were having a great time painting in the street, and that it allowed them to work on a scale that I simply could not achieve in the studio.
There was a coexistence of playful proposals and highly conceptualized ones. At the same time, they had an open and horizontal vision of the relationship between artist, artwork, and audience that I immediately connected with.
So I started painting in the street, and things began to happen. What struck me most was how easily pedestrians felt entitled to comment on and discuss a work in progress with the artist, completely breaking down any distance. The divide between “high” and “low” culture suddenly disappeared.
Throughout your career, you have developed your artistic language across multiple formats: digital and paper illustration, paintings, storytelling, graphic design, murals, and painted shutters. What does experimenting with different media and formats bring to your practice?
I suppose it comes from a mixture of creative curiosity and a desire to experiment. Constantly changing direction is probably not the best strategy if your goal is a strong market position, but I have never been able to stay still within a single format or discipline.
There has also been a certain degree of unconsciousness involved—accepting challenges and allowing myself to follow my interests. At the same time, there is always a balance between market realities and survival. You need to find an equilibrium between the projects you want to create and those that provide direct financial income.
Ultimately, it is about finding the best way to surf between pragmatism and romanticism.
Your works often incorporate graphic elements. What have been the main influences in the development of your artistic style?
I believe visual artworks should provide experiences for the viewer. I am interested not only in the language of painting itself but also in all the external images that we can absorb and incorporate.
The aesthetics of cartoons, comic strips, and graphic novels have fascinated me both for their visual qualities and for their ability to communicate directly through images. The dense and visually stimulating world around us has been my greatest influence. Looking at a painting should not be a less engaging experience than observing any other detail or visual production from contemporary culture.
For a long time, I appropriated images purely for their aesthetic value, ignoring their meanings. However, when I began inserting images into public space, I wanted to take advantage of their narrative power and their capacity for identification. My guiding principle in the street has been to create works that are easy to describe, visually impactful, and open to interpretation.
You combine your artistic career with teaching at several universities. How has this influenced your artistic practice?
Most likely by enriching my working processes. Teaching the course Artistic Interventions has forced me to structure creative processes and transform them into educational content and learning activities.
In other teaching environments, you also realize that the collective creation of a mural can generate a powerful sense of shared experience among participants. This may be connected to the way my perception of the artist’s role has evolved. While I remain interested in the final image, I have also become interested in the journey taken to create it.
This perspective is extremely valuable in education. A public-space intervention is not driven solely by the artist’s intention; it is also shaped by a context, a location, and a community of users. In many ways, this is not so different from responding to a commissioned brief.
As a result, visual artists must demonstrate competence across many fronts: intelligent conceptual interpretation, the creation of engaging imagery, and mastery of appropriate techniques. Achieving this requires both strong conceptual thinking and technical training.
Based on your personal and professional experience, would you say there is a lack of artistic education or creative stimulation in compulsory education? Where do art and education intersect?
My work operates in two spheres: I work with future teachers on one hand and future creative professionals on the other. Students often reveal and carry the shortcomings of compulsory education.
I have the impression that, in general, they arrive at university with a limited range of references and a limited capacity for what we might simply call “seeing things.” It is paradoxical because they are exposed to more images than ever before, yet they often lack an understanding of the path that has led us to the present moment. Perhaps it is simply a lack of cultural knowledge, or an inability to connect the present with cultural heritage, resulting in an unnecessary focus on immediacy.
Rather than equipping students with reflective tools and critical, divergent thinking skills, education often seems to focus on memorizing information of questionable value. Fortunately, there is growing recognition of the importance of art and, above all, of the potential of creative processes linked to artistic practice in our everyday ways of thinking and acting.
What is needed is a more multifaceted, reflective approach based on experimentation and the ability to establish connections.
In 2018, you coordinated a Wall Lab (Wallspot) project with students from EINA’s Public Space Artistic Interventions course, and in 2020 they participated in an intervention in the Poblenou Superblock. Can you tell us more about the course and the preparation required before carrying out this type of project?
When students developed the Wallspot project, it was still part of the former Illustration Techniques course within EINA’s Design Degree. For several years, part of the curriculum had already been developed through mural interventions.
During the 2019–2020 academic year, we redefined the course as Artistic Intervention Practices, focusing on the broad range of possibilities offered by the contemporary city for artistic interventions. Although the course continues to include mural-related content, it now encompasses any type of artistic intervention.
This shift has enabled students to explore proposals for the Poblenou Superblock. The unexpected lockdown situation also highlighted the importance of all the preparatory phases of an intervention.
This preliminary work can be summarized through several stages: site analysis, contextual research, reference gathering, objective definition, conceptualization, visualization, development, and feasibility assessment.
Beyond the romantic image of an artist intervening in the city, there is a professional reality. New employment opportunities linked to projects of this nature are emerging, and we want students to have the tools to assess and take advantage of them. This requires technical skills as well as a conceptual understanding of public space that encourages responsible and critical interventions.
We strongly believe in the idea of the all-terrain creator—a visual practitioner with a solid educational foundation who is capable of taking on broad and interdisciplinary challenges.
In 2019, you created a participatory storytelling mural during the Associa’t a la Festa program as part of Barcelona’s La Mercè festival. Do you think it is important to stimulate creativity in children and young people through urban art?
I believe it is important to stimulate creativity at all times. Urban art possesses a number of qualities that make it especially useful in this regard, particularly because of its proximity to the audience.
The greatest strength of what we call “urban art” is that it breaks down the traditional distance between art and the public. Activities such as Associa’t a la Festa allow artists and participants to collaborate on the creation of a single artwork.
Participants benefit from the artist’s ideas and methods, while the artist, in turn, is enriched by the collective experience.
Finally, what is your opinion on the growth of legal walls in Barcelona and the increase in urban art projects at local and national levels in recent years?
I see the growth of legal walls as an excellent example of a win-win situation: artists gain spaces in which to create within public space, while viewers enjoy a constantly changing artistic experience.
The growth of urban art projects has already moved beyond the explosion phase of recent years and entered a period of reflection: what role do we want urban art to play in our cities?
We all benefit from encountering artworks in public space, but there are still many questions to address. What level of presence should urban art have? Under what conditions? Who should be allowed to intervene? Who should decide, if anyone? How long should works remain? Who should fund them?
At this point, I believe the major challenge is no longer simply allowing artists to intervene in urban spaces. The real milestone will be finding ways for artists to participate in creating spaces that redefine their role within the city itself.
