Urban Grids: The Birth of a Collection
Paris, Memory, and the Olympic Year
In 2024, as Paris prepared to welcome the world for the Summer Olympic Games, I found myself reflecting on a city that had profoundly shaped my life as an artist. Long before becoming one of the world's most celebrated cultural capitals, Paris had been my home. Its streets, architecture, atmosphere, and artistic heritage left an enduring mark on my creative vision.
It was during this unique moment, while the world's attention turned toward Paris, that the first artwork of what would become the Urban Grids Collection was created.
The inaugural piece was dedicated to Paris itself.
Rather than producing a conventional cityscape, I wanted to create something more personal and conceptual. My intention was to explore the invisible relationship between architecture and memory, between the physical structure of a city and the emotions it leaves behind. The Eiffel Tower, the elegant Haussmann façades, the rhythm of the boulevards, and the winding flow of the Seine became the starting point for a visual language that combined architecture, cartography, and artistic interpretation.
The result was an artwork that merged iconic landmarks with a deconstructed urban grid, transforming the city into a poetic landscape of lines, textures, and memories.
What began as a tribute to Paris soon evolved into something much larger.
As I continued working, I realized that every city possesses its own architectural identity, its own visual rhythm, and its own emotional geography. The streets we walk, the buildings we admire, and the places we remember become part of our personal history. Cities are not merely collections of monuments; they are living repositories of memory.
This idea became the foundation of the Urban Grids Collection.
Each artwork combines architectural landmarks with abstract interpretations of urban layouts, creating compositions that exist somewhere between cartography, architecture, and contemporary art. Rather than documenting cities, the collection seeks to capture their essence.
Following Paris, the collection naturally expanded to Barcelona, the city where I live and work today. From the soaring spires of the Sagrada Família to the Gothic beauty of Santa Maria del Mar, from the monumental axis of Plaça d'Espanya to the medieval streets of Ciutat Vella, each piece explores a different chapter of the city's identity.
The series later grew to include other European capitals and architectural landmarks, each interpreted through the same visual language of geometry, memory, and place.
Looking back, it feels fitting that the collection began in Paris during the Olympic year. The Games celebrate encounters between cultures, histories, and people from around the world. In a different way, Urban Grids seeks to do something similar: connecting architecture, history, and personal memory through art.
Today, the collection continues to grow, but its origins remain rooted in a simple idea born in Paris: that every city tells a story, and every street map is a portrait of human experience.