Guillem Font roots art into the shop shutters of Gràcia Central

Guillem Font, illustrator and muralist, roots art into the shop shutters of Gràcia Central as part of the Persianes que fan barri project.

Guillem Font (Barcelona, 1986) is an illustrator and muralist. Trained in Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona and in illustration at the Escola Llotja, he splits his work between Barcelona and Mexico City and combines painting walls with teaching. His murals — monumental plants, animals and organic textures, halfway between scientific illustration and science fiction — have been painted in a dozen countries, and in 2023 he represented Catalan muralism at the Calle Libre festival in Vienna.

Illustrator and muralist Guillem Font is the artist for the Associació de Comerciants Gràcia Central, in the district of Gràcia, within the Persianes que fan barri project: a street art intervention on 185 shops across Barcelona, organised by the Barcelona Creativity & Design Foundation with creative direction by Rebobinart.

Guillem Font’s style: shops that take root

The Gràcia series starts from an organic, botanical metaphor: like plants, shops take root, grow and transform their surroundings. Leaves, stems and natural forms intertwine with the world of each shop, drawing a living commercial ecosystem right in the heart of the neighbourhood.

Pictorially, Guillem Font almost always starts from a black background out of which trees, branches, flowers and plants emerge, rendered with precision and a slight stylisation, worked in spray paint with soft gradients. The palette combines muted greens, ochres, browns, reds and pinks, with grey shadows that widen the composition without competing with the main motif. The figures occupy the central axis and use the vertical format of the shutter to grow from the bottom up, like an urban botanical plate.

One plant for every shop

The metaphor takes shape shutter by shutter: each shop is portrayed by the plant its products come from. At the Estanc de Gràcia the tobacco plant blooms; at La Graciosa, a natural wine shop, grapevines twist; La Algodonera, home textiles, shows a branch of cotton; the Quinoa Bar has its own panicle of red quinoa; Casa Caffè Italia, a branch of the coffee plant; the Forn Yara Pa bakery, ears of sesame; Che Chipá, a gluten-free cassava bread bakery, the cassava plant; and Entre Latas, a tinned-food shop, golden seaweed waving as if on the seabed.

When the product does not come straight from a plant, the link is made through each house’s imaginary: the Mexican bar Chido One gets a flowering nopal, the cactus of the Mexican deserts; the Farmàcia Adela Garcia López, chamomile with a bee on it — nature’s medicine cabinet; at Miralles Joiers, a large red dahlia hides a tiny red beetle among its leaves; at Minuya a branch of cherry blossom bursts open; at Tonangi, the flax plant, from which the fabric comes; and at El Cafè del Teatre, a flowering rosemary, a local plant that ends up in the bar’s cocktails.

Three shutters step outside the initial logic because the shopkeepers themselves proposed them. Alfar Medialunas swaps the planned wheat for an aloe arborescens, the plant that grows in Mar del Plata, where the house comes from. Bar Massagran, with its lifelong regulars, asked for the three lilies of the Vila de Gràcia flag. And IndiDogs, food for dogs and cats, closes the axis with a dionaea muscipula, a carnivorous plant with animal-skin spots. This is how the series was made: a proposal from the artist, an answer from each shop.