Albert Penado (Penao) draws the shop shutters of Les Corts

Albert Penado, known as Penao, draws the shop shutters of Les Corts as part of the Persianes que fan barri project.

Behind Penao is Albert Penado, a visual artist specialising in set design and murals who takes his drawing from paper to the wall. His best-remembered work is the Poblenou façade where he turned a building’s windows into the eyes of a giant face. He has painted murals in Barcelona, India, Indonesia and South Korea, and shutters are nothing new to him: he has a series of his own.

The artist Albert Penado, known as Penao, signs the shutters of 17 shops in the Les Corts district, from the Eix Sants-Les Corts, Les Corts Comerç 08028, Cor de les Corts and the Associació Mirall de Pedralbes, as part of the Persianes que fan barri project: an urban art intervention on 185 shops across Barcelona, organised by the Barcelona Creativity & Design Foundation with creative direction by Rebobinart.

See also Big Waalls, the Poblenou façade Penao painted with Rebobinart, and Un oasis a la ciutat, his mural in Castelldefels.

Penao’s style: a child’s drawings on real paper

The Les Corts series starts from an idea Penao defended in front of the shopkeepers: to focus on the emotion that simple, imperfect and human images create. Each shutter is a hyperrealistic sheet of paper —squared notebook paper, with its spiral binding, crumpled or with a folded corner— that seems stuck to the shutter, and on it there is a drawing made the way a child would make it, with crayons, pencils and markers. For the artist, a child’s drawing is expressiveness at its highest: free lines, unfiltered imagination and authenticity.

The game lies in the contrast between two languages. The paper and one object from each trade are painted with volume and shadow, as if someone had left them there: a tape measure and a thimble at the Fent Punt haberdashery, a pair of scissors at the barber’s, thick-rimmed glasses and a pen at Òptica Tesare, a stethoscope at Farmàcia Gispert-Riaza, a cat’s paw resting on the Terranova shutter, three coloured pencils at the My English House academy. On top, the child’s line tells the story of the shop: two mobile phones fighting at Versus Mobile, an oriental dragon at S Fusion, the lemon cake recipe at La Provençana, a mother with a pram and a rainbow at the baby shop Al Teu Ventre, a bar scene at El Xile.

Penao did not arrive with finished designs. His way of working was to talk to each shopkeeper and build the image together, with no logos and a clear continuity: the same sheet, the same graphic quality and the same illustrative style from one end of the neighbourhood to the other. The background of each sheet keeps the colour of the shutter —green, maroon, pink, blue, black— so the series is recognisable while every shop keeps its own identity.

The gallery will be extended with the City Pilates shutter.