livensa-living-barcelona-parallel-by-jay-kaes

In the first week of August 2026, Rebobinart produced “The Distance”, the mural painted by Jay Kaes in the inner courtyard of the new Livensa Living Barcelona Paral·lel student residence, on Avinguda del Paral·lel. It is our second project with Jay Kaes, after the “Plural Strength” mural in Nou Barris, and one more chapter in the series of large-format murals we produce for the group’s residences.

A commission close to home

Livensa Living has commissioned another mural from us, and this time close to home: at its new student residence on Paral·lel, in the centre of Barcelona. Jay Kaes chose to answer the brief with his mural, “The Distance”, a story made for the people who live there.

“The Distance”

The work is about the personal journey of students who leave their home town to settle in a new city. Beyond the physical move, the mural explores the inner transformation that happens when someone steps out of their comfort zone and opens up to new ways of living, thinking and understanding the world.

Through the repetition and gradual transformation of a single image, the piece portrays a process of continuous change: what looks like an academic journey turns out to be an experience of human and cultural growth. Meeting people from other places, other languages and other customs ends up widening the traveller’s outlook. Distance stops being merely a gap between two places and becomes a space of transformation: everything that happens between the place we leave behind and the person we become on arrival.

The artist

Jay Kaes (b. 1985) is a Spanish artist based in London. With a Fine Arts degree from the University of the Basque Country, he has painted murals across five continents and more than twenty countries, for public institutions — the city councils of Barcelona and Gothenburg — and for brands such as American Express and Netflix. Regarded by some as the creator of the “Glitch Pop” style, he combines photorealism, line drawing and digital patterns to build pieces that question our perception of reality and invite viewers to accept imperfection and difference as part of the beauty of the world.

How it was made

The piece covers more than 200 m² of a wall in the building’s inner courtyard — the courtyard every room looks onto. It is not a work you go and visit, then, but the view residents have from home every day. It was painted entirely with spray paint — around 250 cans of MTN94 in 57 colours — on a rendered ceramic wall primed in white, with no final varnish. Painting in an inner courtyard with the building almost finished meant erecting interior scaffolding with every finish protected and working in step with the site.

Rebobinart handled the project end to end: contracts and copyright, safety planning, scaffolding, materials and on-site direction. The artist painted for seven days, from 3 to 9 August, with his assistant, Lucía Ruiz Zubizarreta, and our team completed the finishing touches the following week.

Livensa Living and urban art

Livensa Living includes large-format murals in its student residences across Spain and Portugal, and Rebobinart has produced many of them: PichiAvo in Barcelona Diagonal Alto, Boa Mistura in Getafe, Uriginal in Alcobendas and, in Granada, Marina Capdevila and Alberto Montes. The Paral·lel mural joins the series with a work made precisely for the people who will live there: students who have just arrived in Barcelona from somewhere else.