Gemma Fontanals paints the shop shutters of Sant Andreu

Gemma Fontanals, illustrator, paints the shop shutters of Sant Andreu as part of the Persianes que fan barri project.

Gemma Fontanals (Llorenç del Penedès, 1991) is an illustrator based in Barcelona. She studied Fine Arts and Philosophy at the Universitat de Barcelona and trained in illustration and graphic design at EINA, where her master’s final project —FIERA, a fictional feminist fanzine fair— won a LAUS Gold Award. She combines illustration with muralism and fanzine self-publishing, and is a member of Colectivo Baricela.

Artist Gemma Fontanals signs the shutters of the Eix Sant Andreu, in the Sant Andreu district, around Carrer Gran and Rambla de Fabra i Puig, as part of the Persianes que fan barri project: an urban art intervention across 185 shops in Barcelona, organised by the Barcelona Creativity & Design Foundation with creative direction by Rebobinart.

Gemma Fontanals’s style: the small gestures of care

The Sant Andreu series gives value to what usually goes unnoticed: small gestures of care also build the life of a neighbourhood. Gemma Fontanals’s shutters gather those gestures — serving, caring, repairing, feeding — and hand them back to the street as images.

Graphically, Gemma Fontanals works in a very synthetic, cheerful language: schematic human figures with bulky bodies and simple geometry, built from large areas of flat colour and few details. The palette is bright and high-contrast —pinks, blues, yellows, reds, whites, blacks and purples— and the scenes usually show people toasting, caring for one another or celebrating, often with floating elements (stars, sparkles, glasses) that reinforce a playful, optimistic tone.

Seen together, each shutter translates the shop’s trade into a minimal scene: two figures toasting with a glass at the wine shop, a giant toothbrush at the dental clinic, an adult handing a tooth to a crowned child at the tooth-fairy shop, an air conditioning unit beside a snowman at the climate company. Faces are resolved with a single line —an eye, a smile— so that anyone can recognise themselves in them. And when the shutter is dark, Gemma Fontanals changes tack: she drops the figures and keeps the objects —Fika’s kettle and coffee maker, Towers’s scooter— with a reduced palette that breathes against the black.