Places layer upon each other when moving through an unknown city. I think of Brooklyn one evening, looking for a friend’s house, walking on an empty shuttered street, but here it is mid-afternoon in the neighborhood of Gràcia and the shops are closed. As it was, I became enamored with murals and I had George Orwell‘s Homage to Catalonia in my hands.

“More shots rang out. The bullets from the tower were flying across the street and a crowd of panic-stricken people were rushing down the Ramblas, away from the firing; up and down the street you could hear snap – snap – snap as the shop-keepers slammed the steel shutters over their windows.”

A need to protect property has endowed Barcelona with a kind of blank canvas, the shutters that guard the glass windows of shops. Doors roll down over the whole storefront, blocking the ability to window-shop while the store is closed. Then, there is art that comes to fill the void.

Diverse and striking murals line the streets of Gràcia. With tight streets that give the feeling the old village it once was, Gràcia is located inland from the touristic Ramblas promenade and nightclubs, and outside of wide, octagonal grid of Eixample. The feeling is that graffiti is allowed here; it is tolerated and it is loved.

Within the graffiti world, the opponents of the status quo are often in dialogue and in opposition with each other–murals are painted over, tags are obliterated, layers of messages cake the neighborhood walls.

“For under the surface-aspect of the town, under the luxury and growing poverty, under the seeming gaiety of the streets, with their flower-stalls, their many-colored flags, their propaganda-posters, and thronging crowds, there was an unmistakable and horrible feeling of political rivalry and hartred.”

Graffiti, viewed as vandalism shows a deteriorated neighborhood, but the same image viewed as art endows the neighborhood with a sense of place and identity. Being there is a more valuable experience for some.

The Guardian reported in their December 2010 article “Barcelona shopkeepers face fines over graffiti decoration” that city officials having been cracking down the street art, from graffiti tags to commissioned works, calling it “antisocial behavior” that “degrades urban fabric.” Sometimes the murals are decorative or creative works but often the paintings seems associated with the stores themselves, working as signs. The quality of the murals varies from door to door and even if not great art, they add to the city’s character.

“They had hauled down their red flag and hoisted the Catalan national flag. On the Telephone Exchange, the starting-point of all the trouble, the Catalan national flag and the Anarchist flag were flying side by side.”

In the most revolutionary of times that Orwell witnessed, the anarchist and the Catalan flag were flying together; a duality was persevered. When the anarchists were quelled, their flag came down. In Orwell’s time, the city was thriving with propaganda posters and messages carved in walls. Spain was being torn apart into conflicting groups struggling for control. Civilians were thrust into the midst, and on the anti-Franco side, opposition groups splintered apart.

“Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. In the barbers’ shops were Anarchist notices (the barbers were mostly Anarchists) solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves. In the streets coloured posters appealing to prostitutes to stop being prostitutes.”

Graffiti shows current situations and trends. It responds first, and because its creation happens in public, it is seen immediately. Its goal is often to ignite social change. In the mural above, it is the message to preserve the neighborhood-community-vila, though the idea of finding a Catalan identity in art began around the turn of the century. The mural speaks of a dichotomy, resist and create popular culture, with references to “Block bloc” and fiery collapsing cityscape. Outsiders should not dictate identity it seems to say.

Seeing the flames, the Eurozone firewall comes to mind, recently raised again to protect Europe from Spain’s economic problems. High rates of unemployment plague the country and its youth. Vibrancy is on the streets but shops and restaurants are dull and expensive. Predominant culture feels worn out.

Imitations of traditional culture are propagated for the sake of tourism. On a windy late winter day, I walk through the village of Barceloneta where seafood restaurants serving paella all along its oceanfront have mostly empty expansive seating, but a few blocks into the interior and there is a crowded bar serving hot battered seafood and beer. The tourists are not here to fill up the tourist joints.

The spirit of revolution persists in home-made posters instructing social action. A stenciled sign tells me that I am welcome here but that the rental of a holiday apartment is destroying the local socio-culutral fabric.

“I turned around and saw some youths, with rifles in their hands and the red and black handkerchiefs of the Anarchists round their throats, edging up a side-street…”

Remnants of revolution are all over the city. Orwell characterizes Barcelona as “a town with a long history of street fighting.” His book gives a cross section of the Spanish Civil War, but even before that, Barcelona’s streets saw many sieges on the city through the Catalonian Civil War, Nine Years’ War, War of the Spanish Succession, and the Peninsular War, as well as the infamous Tragic Week (1909) which pitted the national army against the working class, probably still in the minds of Barcelonans during the Spanish Civil War. With the Republican government overthrown, Franco’s dictatorship ruled Spain until his death in 1978.

An election last November in the midst of economic troubles brought a change from the socialist policy of Zapatero to the conservative Popular Party headed by Rajoy. Depictions of the hammer and sickle can be found all over the city. Imposed on Spain’s flag, the symbol seem to be leftist or anti-fascist, though not clearly socialist, communist, or anarchist. Some have been defaced with spray paint, showing political factions among those who paint the streets.

“…every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties…”

Barcelona stores were used as prisons during the Spanish Civil War. Today, scenes behind those walls often remain a mystery and shop hours are often sporadic. When a location that I’ve walked by several times is suddenly awake, an open shutter radiantly changes the general street scene.

On a narrow Gràcia sidewalk, I see the depiction of human lethargy and weakness on the door of an evangelical church that holds its services behind there. I’ve seen other murals by this artist around town that show creatures vomiting in this same black and white linear style that looks like hair or scales. A different painter has picked up on this same idea of ornamental overlay on the figure-it seems right out of Barcelona and its sea of tiny detail, but lacks the grandiose design. Instead, the ornamental detail in the figures below seems to be weighed down by their repetitious form.

“…its huddle of human bodies, its lack of furniture – just the bare stone floor, one bench and a few ragged blankets – and its murky light, for the corrugated steel shutter had been drawn over the windows. On the grimy walls revolutionary slogans – ‘Visca POUM!’ ‘Viva la Revolución!’ and so forth – had been scrawled. The place had been used as a dump for political prisoners for the months past.”

Andrea Michaelsson’s Amy Winehouse appeared on the BTOY Flickr photostream on August 11, 2011 for the first time, over a month before the singer’s death. Known for her depictions of women, her paintings of Winehouse show her cultural intuition. Winehouse’s death makes her stenciled image ghost-like. Another woman I find in her stencil style is actress Ginger Rogers.

Andrea’s focus on celebrity as power embraces popular thought and shows powerful women within the existing structure. Her icons are gorgeous, but work to transform their world through their creative endeavors. She looks outside her culture for many of her inspiring figures that she displays on her hometown streets.

“The safest thing at present was to look as bourgeois as possible. We frequented the fashionable residential quarter of the town, where our faces were not known, went to expensive restaurants and were very English with the waiters. For the first time in my life I took to writing things on walls. The passageways of several smart restaurants had ‘Visca POUM!’ scrawled on them as large as I could write it.”

The problems that Spain faces are hunched on the back of its citizens. The individual, however, can do very little it seems. We are told to be confident and continue spending so that the economy can bounce back. Graffiti often evades consumer culture and their use of the rolling door might be in protest, though their art is essential decoration and contributes to the sense of place that is Barcelona.

The “aftermath of the financial crisis” according to the nytimes.com is “grim”: “about half the age group under 25 out of work; €600 billion, or $820 billion, in mortgages outstanding after the end of a construction boom two years ago; and an exchange rate overvalued by 10 percent according to the European Commission. Productivity and competitiveness are low.” So many of us today are young artists in a challenged economy. The young artist in a challenged economy is an archetype of our current world, and it is not just the young people of Spain that face such a fate. Concepts drive us all forward. The young struggling artist is not unique to Spain, though they certainly face a challenge in a unique heritage.

Looking outlined in chalk, on an old wooden door, a crab holds a camera whose lens is labeled luna, illustrating the meaning of the phrase “shoot the moon”.

“In such places things happen quickly, the factions are ready-made, everyone knows the local geography, and when the guns begin to shoot people take their places almost as in a fire drill.”

That impression of preparedness to fight led Orwell to remark on Barcelona’s history of street fighting. Today, graffiti artists struggle to define and speak to their own culture. Messages scrawled on the wall are not a new form of expression, but one of the most basic means of public communication, and graffiti is international in scope. Theirs is an artform that is expressive, decorative and essential to street life in Barcelona and elsewhere. They desire to contribute to a Spanish identity that is not sculpted by financial gain. It is landscape rich with ideas and idealism needed to move culture out of the old world. Graffiti is the voice of a highly fractured group, but there is a unifying message about the power of art.

All photographs by Celie Dailey.

Ilana lives in São Paulo and most of her photos in this series “An eruption and another” were taken on the island of Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands. Levan has lived in Barcelona for 12 years, and was born and raised in Georgia. His photographs document a summer in Barcelona. Ilana and Levan are linked by their desire to document, and to leave the photographs unaltered.

Ilana Lichtenstein, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

Ilana’s photographs document the small space between photographer and her subject. The images are often textured by the grain of slide film in low light, sometimes made milky as though looking through a window, or catching the shadows of an event. Printed on cotton paper, Ilana’s photos feel soft and intimate. No glass covers the work when displayed so the depth of blackness is not impeded by shine.

Levan Tsulukidze, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

Levan chooses to step back, sometimes looking at the landscape from above, choosing compositions that are flat with colors heightened by bright light. Though visually in contrast, both artists evade landmarks or monuments, in search of the quotidian reality of place.

When I began contemplating their work, I was inclined to seek out how their cultural identity is revealed in their art, but as Ilana wrote in response, “everything is really an amalgam.” She explains: “I shouldn’t forget that I am at the same time Brazilian, born in the huge city of São Paulo, with Polish roots…I wouldn’t be able to separate or to define with just a couple of words which one should be my identity.”

Ilana Lichtenstein, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

While viewing art in the gallery, before talking with her, I was unable to recognize anything Brazilian in Ilana’s art, so I asked Chico, the gallery director, if he had any sense of her cultural background. He said that when me met Ilana, yes, it was clear that she is Brazilian, but there is nothing in her art that reveals it. He commented on her personal aesthetic of building very dark, though not depressing, imagery. I wondered if living in the global city of São Paulo had contributed to a need to internalize and find her personal vision and methods.

Ilana Lichtenstein, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

Ilana elegantly wrote this response to me: “…being born in a big and restless city like mine, I feel very much attracted to places of silence or emptiness. Or to a kind of feeling…with sensitiveness, quietude, like on my portraits where people have their eyes closed or are standing backwards. A quest for a deep breath. At the same time, I will never be sure at what point this taste for a dark or silent side is a reaction, or if it would have grown the same way if my great-grandparents had never left Poland, or if we were all born in Japan.”

Levan Tsulukidze, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

Levan’s art has a similar feeling of anonymity about it. When I questioned him, he said that he recognized himself more than his culture in his work, and although he felt like there probably is some influence on his art as a Georgian, his point of view is global. He sees himself as distinctly Georgian, but feels comfortable and inspired in Barcelona, and occasionally travels for work and pleasure, corresponding with me about this article from Vietnam.

The emphasis for contemporary artists is to find their voice. Confined to a geographic location, artists may find their identity or subject matter from within a group. However, Ilana says “I don’t have a commitment to doing ‘Brazilian art’, for example, I feel very grateful and fond of the work of Brazilian-born artists who have composed and still compose my path, and who I’ve met here.” Our (developed) world has long lost such solid boundaries. The traveler and migrant are exposed to a vast sea of influence.

“…it’s the feeling of being in a kind of strangeness that instigates me,” Ilana says of traveling, “I feel comfortable when not understanding, somehow, because it leads to another kind of relationship with the entourage.” About a trip to Japan, she says: “I couldn’t read any of the signs or decode the words spoken, so it was the bliss of a marvelous country open for the imagination.”

Ilana Lichtenstein, 2010. Courtesy of the artist.

Donald Barthelme spoke about the process of “not-knowing” as integral to artistic endeavor. Travel is a means to provoke this state of “strangeness”, to be removed from habit and habitual knowledge, to find that unknown moment of invention.

Ilana Lichtenstein, 2010. Courtesy of the artist.

Ilana Lichtenstein, 2010. Courtesy of the artist.

In her dyptich, Ilana describes the reasoning for her grainy imagery: “…as Vilém Flusser – a Czech philosopher who has lived in São Paulo for a long time – tells, or from what I understood, it is vital to push the limits of the machine further; at least to try to go beyond its programme. And also I had very low light and wanted to take the picture of this boy sleeping…” Photography is a medium that strips away the artifacts of the artist’s hand; there is no brush stroke. Even so, Ilana allowed herself to find this image that is imbibed in her personality.

The photographers, Ilana and Levan, do not use the figure to make portraits; the camera is not thrust upon the subjects in the photographs; the role of the landscape is not as background to the action or character. Instead, the photos are expressive fragments, the subjects are landscape, and the landscapes show personality. Maybe due to comfort or distance, both Ilana and Levan photograph people who rarely engage the lens. Instead of dominating the experience, the photographer is free to observe and is let loose from the reactivity that the camera often cultivates.

Ilana is represented in São Paulo by Galeria Virgilio. She has participated in group shows in São Paulo such as Presenças (Appearances) at Galeria Zipper and 12 exemplares at Associação Cultural Cecília. She studied communications at Escola de Comunicações e Artes, University of São Paulo, then studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, Paris, investigating image and memory. She trained in photography at Centre Iris pour la Photographie in 2009 and Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado in 2011-2012.

Levan Tsulukidze holds a degree in European Studies from the University of Leeds and studied video editing and graphic design at the Asociación Española de Empresas Multimedia. He participated in the 15/15 Film Festival, Australia, where his film Pinza it was nominated as best experimental video. He also worked as Director of Photography for El Debate, a film produce by the Centre d’Estudis Cinematogràfics de Catalunya.

The upcoming exhibition at Paradigmas, Between Three Artists (March 6th – May 5th), features the work of Brazilians Regina de Paula and Cristina Salgado, with Encarna Romero of Barcelona.

Rithika Merchant, Titanomachy, 2011. Gouache and Ink on Paper. Courtesy of the Artist.

Walking in Barcelona’s Espai B Galeria, Rithika Merchant‘s playful yet precise lines are immediately captivating. She depicts creatures that are humanoid in flat and floating world. Her repetitious line is used to build up pattern and fill in form rather than rendering them in space. Her large drawings are made on sheets of paper set in a grid or geometric design that symmetrically break apart the compositions with solid white lines.

A recent transplant to Barcelona, Rithika’s drawings seem at home here with the vibrant mosaics and whimsical architecture of the city. Beginning in the late 19th century, the Modernisme movement defined a Catalonian aesthetic in Barcelona. With a rich history of tile work of Moorish influence integrated with a visionary use of organic forms inspired by Art Nouveau, a fanciful urban space pouring with detail defines the present-day city. Being born in Mumbai, having studied in New York, and now living in Barcelona, Rithika has a unique worldview that is both conceptual and crafty.

Rithika’s characters are set in simple landscapes, allowing her obsessive ornamentation to shine. God-like creatures are repeated through her drawings, and build up to form narratives and reveal a personalized mythology.

Titanomachy, or the Titan War, makes reference to the Greek stories of battles fought between the family of gods before the existence of man. There is no clear winner in Rithika’s drawing, and the gods exist in a static moment before the action of battle has been resolved. Here, the gods are a green woman-creature and a woman on bucking horse. There are two seem like opposing forces, one trampling the other, but both make reference to the natural world. The greenish woman has big eyes like an owl, a woodland creature of the night. The reddish woman seems to ride with the sun, filling the night sky. An octopus, a creature known for its intelligence, blocks her sight. The horse seems to be taking the place of her female sex organs, and her body appears muscular, looking like a man entering battle. The rearing horse seems very phallic in this reading, its mouth spitting a cloud in ecstasy.

Rithika Merchant, Deus Otiosus, 2011. Gouache and Ink on Paper. Courtesy of the Artist.

Rithika’s Deus Otiosus, Latin for neutral or idle god, makes reference to the concept of an unacting or hidden god who takes no part in ruling the world. Here, the greenish woman-creature is seen again, and her depiction as a kind of bird in a nest is clear. Her hands form an open circle, at the spot of her Sacral Chakra, also the center of the image where four corners of paper converge. She sits in a region above the blue sky, in some kind of radiant vortex illuminated by her head. Her decorative face makes her immediately recognized as the trampled character from Titanomachy. Her face is distinctly labial, and sits in waiting or meditation.

The more that these drawings are examined, the more narratives can be drawn out of them, even if not exactly what the artist intended. Like characters in a dream, the explanatory process is what is important, rather than an objective or correct understanding of the symbols.

A Pagan or polytheistic worldview anthropomorphizes natural phenomenon. These kind of warring god myths were widespread through the ancient world and Middle Ages, found in the mythological traditions that spanned European cultures from Babylonia to Scandinavia, often having to do with the creation of the world’s features and humanity. Rithika’s appropriation of the mythological process allows her to create fictions that speak to human nature and dredge the subconscious for her own identity (and the viewer’s).

Drawings by Rithika Merchant are currently in Espai B Galeria’s “B-space” or back gallery where they keep a collection of works from artists that they have featured. Floor-to-ceiling displays of art are packed into the B-space, whereas their front gallery gives artwork the buffer of white that is the typical style of an art show. However, the B-space is what the gallery is really about—-keeping an abundance of work on display so that the art-seekers will find work that captivates them and a variety of Barcelona artists are kept accessible to the public.

Rithika has a number of activities to her credit, having shown in group and solo exhibitions in galleries across Europe and in New York, Mumbai, and Montreal. Rithika studied in New York at Parsons The New School For Design, graduating in 2008, and also attended the Hellenic International Studies in the The Arts program on the island of Paros, Greece.

Currently exhibiting at the N2 Gallery in Barcelona, Spain are the works of Spanish artist Aurelia Munoz. The works on display are delicate, yet formidable, sculptures made of materials ranging from handmade paper to textile fibers. The piece Entre Social, 1976, is a large-scale macrame sculpture that serves as testimony to Munoz’s ability to beautifully marry geometry and abstraction with natural textiles, creating an entirely new three-dimensional artistic vocabulary. Mandala con flores, 1988, gives new meaning to the term “work on paper”. Made from tiny pieces of handmade paper, suspended on tiny strips of flax linen, Munoz successfully straddles the two and three-dimensional planes, capturing the ever-elusive medium of shadow. This exhibition, which will be on view through November, marks the first gallery exhibition for the 83 year-old in nearly thirty years, as her work primarily is shown in museums.

Aurelia Munoz was born in 1926 in Barcelona, Spain. Her works are included in many museum collections worldwide such as the Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Stedelijk van Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh, Scotland; Museum of Contemporary Art Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain and theMuseum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, Spain just to name a few.