Carlos Arriaga

CARLOS ARRIAGA (Madrid, 1958).
“Calm,” 2026.
Oil, pencil, grisailles from a black-and-white photograph, and clear resin on canvas.
Signed and dated in the lower left corner. Titled and dated on the reverse.
Measurements: 102 x 150 cm.
Through his camera, Arriaga captures urban landscapes that he later meticulously transforms in the studio, constructing impossible scenarios and imagined cities. His compositions are reminiscent of the work of a visionary urban planner: a perfect metropolis, suspended between reality and dream. Carlos Arriaga’s works thus invite us to explore a reinvented, poetic, and timeless Madrid; a city that does not entirely belong to our dimension. From an aerial and almost divine perspective, the artist offers us the fleeting experience of gazing upon the capital from the sky. Fascinating opposites coexist in his landscapes: nature and architecture, chaos and harmony, apocalypse and rebirth. Without sun or moon, without temporal references, his cities seem to exist in an eternal moment.
Carlos Arriaga, a professional photographer and painter, forged much of his artistic career in New York, where he studied photography, cinematography, drawing, and painting at the prestigious Arts Students League. Later, he continued his training in Madrid at the Arauco Foundation under the guidance of the renowned master Guillermo Muñoz Vera.
Since 1980, he has built a solid career as a professional photographer, collaborating with leading advertising agencies and some of the most influential fashion magazines and general-interest publications on the national scene. At the same time, his paintings have been exhibited at major international venues and fairs, such as the Affordable Art Fair in Brussels (2014 and 2019), as well as at the Cartel Gallery in Málaga and the Pepe Pisa Gallery in Madrid, among others. His talent has been recognized with various awards, including the 14th Carlos de Haes Visual Arts Competition (Madrid, 1996), the 119th Autumn Salon (Madrid, 2002), and the 25th BMW Painting Prize (Madrid, 2010).
In 2015, her career took a decisive turn: she began experimenting with a unique technique that fuses oil paint and black-and-white photography, which has become her most distinctive artistic signature. Inspired by grisaille, the ancient monochrome technique used by medieval Flemish masters to recreate the effect of bas-relief, Arriaga reinterprets this classical language from a profoundly contemporary perspective.