Marcelo Fuentes in Barcelona: “Apuntes para un paisaje” and the Long Tradition of Painting the City

A bridge, a façade, the corner of a roof against a pale sky: Marcelo Fuentes paints places you feel you could name — until you try. Marcelo Fuentes: Apuntes para un paisaje at Alzueta Gallery, Barcelona opened on 15 October 2026 at the gallery’s Turó space and runs until 6 November. It is the Valencian painter’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, and a compact, absorbing lesson in how a city becomes a feeling.

Marcelo Fuentes and Apuntes para un paisaje

The title translates as “Notes for a Landscape”, and the word apuntes — notes, sketches, jottings — is exact. The works on view are oils on canvas and watercolours on paper, all from 2026, many of them intimate in scale: an oil of 33 × 38 cm, watercolours between roughly 20 and 50 cm across, a watercolour flower study among them. They behave like pages from a visual notebook, keeping traces of observation while leaving space for memory and imagination to finish the picture.

Fuentes typically begins from something real — recognisable buildings, bridges, architectural fragments — but description is not the goal. Forms are simplified, outlines soften, and colour turns into atmosphere until the specific place becomes hard to pin down. People are almost entirely absent. What remains is built mass, perspective, light and empty space, and the viewer’s attention shifts from the life of the city to the act of contemplating it.

From Canaletto to De Chirico: a lineage

Alzueta’s exhibition text sets Fuentes in a long history, and it is worth following. For centuries, cities in paintings were mostly backdrops for religious or historical narratives. From the early modern period onward they became subjects in their own right, a development that peaked in the eighteenth-century Venetian vedute of Canaletto, Guardi and Bellotto — views painted for travellers on the Grand Tour who wanted to take a city home with them.

Those views were never neutral. Choice of viewpoint, light and atmosphere shaped what they showed, and the capriccio openly mixed real and invented architecture. The thread continues through Vermeer’s townscape, the Impressionists’ Paris and the silent, metaphysical piazzas of Giorgio de Chirico. Fuentes belongs to the quieter end of that tradition: closer to De Chirico’s emptiness than Canaletto’s bustle, but with a watercolourist’s softness rather than a metaphysician’s hard shadows.

Who is Marcelo Fuentes?

Born in Valencia in 1955, where he still lives and works, Fuentes began exhibiting at Café Malvarrosa, a gathering place for poets and painters in the city. Through the critic and curator Juan Manuel Bonet, his work was shown at IVAM in Valencia and at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, and IVAM holds his work in its collection. He has collaborated with the French photographer Bernard Plossu on many exhibitions — a pairing that makes sense when you see how both artists handle light and empty urban space.

Architecture and the city have been his constant subjects, later joined by flowers, a motif he approached alongside Rosa Artero. His solo exhibitions include Galerie Camera Obscura in Paris (2014, 2016, 2020 and 2023), Galería Juan Gris in Madrid (2011) and Roma at Espace 14 in Nîmes (2024); he showed at ARCO from 1995 to 2007 and at Art Paris from 2023 to 2025.

Barcelona context

The exhibition arrives in a year when Barcelona is World Capital of Architecture, and a show about painting buildings feels well timed. Alzueta Gallery operates several spaces — in Barcelona (Sèneca and Turó), Madrid and Paris, plus Palau de Casavells in Girona — and the Turó space in the upper part of the city offers a calmer setting than the busy galleries of the centre, well suited to small, contemplative works.

Why it matters

• For painters: a model of how to simplify architecture without losing its weight, and how watercolour can carry atmosphere as fully as oil.
• For collectors: small-format oils and watercolours by a painter with museum recognition in Spain and a steady exhibition record in France.
• For city lovers: a reminder that every urban view is an interpretation.

Visiting information

Alzueta Gallery — Barcelona Turó, C/ Josep Bertrand 3, 08021 Barcelona. 15 October – 6 November 2026. Monday–Friday 9am–2pm and 4–7pm; check weekend hours with the gallery. Phone +34 93 404 16 82, [email protected]. See the official exhibition page, our Marcelo Fuentes listing, and Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries for more shows in Barcelona, Madrid and beyond.