Some artists approach creation as a destination; others see it as a continuous state of movement. Claudio Portalo belongs firmly to the latter. His practice has never been confined to a single discipline or medium. Painting, poetry, performance and urban intervention all form part of the same artistic language, one that finds its natural setting in the city and in the people who inhabit it. Over the past few years, Portalo has developed a body of work rooted in direct engagement with public space, transforming discarded construction materials into artworks that return to the streets carrying new narratives and new possibilities.
With A New Artist in the City, Portalo opens a new chapter without abandoning the questions that have long defined his practice. Conceived as a living process rather than a conventional exhibition, the project invites visitors to witness the making of the work itself, turning creation into a shared experience. At the same time, it marks a return to a more gestural, Neo-Expressionist visual language, reconnecting with ideas and techniques that predate his urban interventions while expanding them into new territory.
We spoke with Claudio Portalo about the street as both material and metaphor, the vulnerability of creating in public, the transformative power of process, and why art should remain a space for encounter, friction and play.
For years, your artistic practice has been deeply connected to the street, to found objects, and to the transformation of discarded materials. In A New Artist in the City, that impulse still seems to be present, but relocated inside a gallery. What has it been like to bring the unpredictable energy of public space into a more traditional exhibition setting?
Hello everyone. It’s a pleasure, and it makes me really happy to be here again and have this conversation.
My artistic practice in the urban environment is essentially my root. Hip-hop culture found me when I was nine years old, in the streets of my hometown, at a time when the scene was really thriving. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, graffiti and breakdancing became both my education and my discipline.
I like to think of the street as a living organism, constantly expanding and contracting, endlessly transforming because people are always interacting within it. That’s why, unlike many artists, when I talk about the street, I’m not really talking about the street itself; I’m talking about people. I’m talking about human beings.
To answer your question, opening up the creative process for seven days, working twelve hours a day inside the very gallery where the work was simultaneously being created and exhibited, has been the closest thing to playing in the street. And, ultimately, playing in the street is the closest thing to playing at home. It felt natural, rewarding and genuinely enjoyable.
This exhibition turns the creative process into the real event. Visitors are confronted not only with finished works, but also with the doubts, mistakes and decisions that make them possible. What interests you about exposing that vulnerability, and what do you think it reveals about the artist’s practice?
I think what we’ve done is place the creative process on the same level of importance as the finished artwork. Showing the process within the exhibition space itself came from a desire to bring art closer to people, and that stems from a concern I think many of us share within contemporary art: there is an enormous, almost painful distance between the artwork and the audience. I’m very firm when I say that this no longer interests me.
I believe the artwork should be as close to people as the artist is to the work itself.
In this era of constant and often absurd overexposure, in which all of us participate, actively or passively, I find it fascinating to investigate the physical exposure of both the artwork and the artist, not just their digital presence.
This exhibition has answered some of the questions I came in with, but it has also generated many new ones. Those questions are keeping this line of research alive, and I’m eager to continue exploring it.
We live in a time when images are consumed almost instantly, and we often only encounter the finished result. Do you see this exhibition as a defence of time, slowness and the invisible labour behind artistic creation?
Yes, I do. But above all, I see this project as a defence of the process itself as an end in its own right.
The finished artwork is merely a witness, a testimony to the process that created it.
Our era pushes us to produce as though we were working on one of Henry Ford’s assembly lines. With this body of work, I want to shift the focus back onto the process because it’s the process that transforms me as an artist. And if we want our work to question something, to transform someone, then the richness of that process is the only thing we can truly hold on to.
You’ve created more than a thousand urban interventions in just a few years. After such an intense period of production, how has your relationship with painting, and with the very idea of creating, changed?
Over the past three years, I’ve painted around eight hundred works in the street and sold between 280 and 300 pieces through public and private sales. As far as I know, my work is now in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, the United States, and Venezuela.
During these years, the essence of my urban practice has been to collect construction waste, the by-product of real estate speculation, paint it in the street, and return it to the street as a self-portrait signed simply as Claudio.
That way of working gradually led me towards a kind of automatism, and that, in turn, made me question whether I wanted to continue painting from that place.
Taking this new step into galleries carries with it all the momentum and inspiration that the street has given me, but it also allows me to embrace the work while I’m making it. To pause before leaving it behind. To experience every brushstroke as a conscious decision. To become one with the process again. That was something I truly needed.
The act of collecting discarded materials, transforming them, and returning them to the city has an almost poetic dimension. What continues to fascinate you about materials that others consider worthless, and what do they reveal about the society that produces them?
It’s poetic, but it’s also political.
There’s something poetic about taking wood from construction-site containers or from the rubble sacks overflowing onto Madrid’s streets, because those materials are destined to disappear. They were once part of someone’s home, perhaps even the home of one of my neighbours. When I take them, paint them, transform them, and then another neighbour takes them back home, that poetry becomes something almost epic.
But it’s also political because the very industry of real estate speculation, the one that buys homes, renovates them and rents or sells them at outrageous prices, is the same industry that provides the support for my work.
This is my way of doing politics at street level. My way of positioning myself against our current housing model. My way of saying to power that, if necessary, we’ll build a bonfire out of its rubble and burn the whole thing down.
In this exhibition, you move away from the most recognisable visual language of the Claudio project and embrace a more neo-expressionist approach. Did you feel the need to break away from the expectations people might have had about your work?
I’d say that Neo-Expressionism is the language in which I feel most comfortable developing my ideas. Over time, I’ve built my own vocabulary and my own set of symbols, and if I wanted to expand on everything I’d already been saying through my work in the streets, this was the place to do it.
Returning to a visual language you had already explored before your urban interventions also feels like an exercise in memory. Would you say this exhibition is a return to your origins, or rather a reconciliation between all the different versions of Claudio that have existed until now?
It has a lot to do with reconciliation, and it has a lot to do with returning to my origins.
The title, A New Artist in the City, is particularly intriguing because it speaks of transformation and reinvention. Who is this “new” artist? Is it an irony, a wish, or a statement of intent?
The exhibition’s subtitle is Neither New to the City, Nor a New Artist.
In 2026, I celebrate twenty years of artistic practice and seven years living in this city. I like to think of the title as a statement of intent.
Over the past decade, while continuing to develop my visual language, I’ve devoted most of my time to acting, appearing in both cinema and television. In fact, just three weeks before opening this exhibition, I was presenting a feature film in cinemas in which I play one of the leading roles.
A New Artist in the City is my first solo exhibition. So, more than ironic, the title is sarcastic. I like to understand the world, and life itself, as a network of tensions: push and pull, force and counterforce.
The title already creates a tension, and tension is a mystery. Mystery generates attraction.
Ultimately, I entered this space to resolve that tension and to make love to those blank canvases.
The street and social media have both been essential in building your community. How has that direct relationship with your audience influenced the way you understand art and position yourself within the contemporary art world?
The street has given me countless stories. It has taught me that it’s the most vibrant place you can possibly encounter because something is always happening.
I go to many exhibitions, and I genuinely think there are some incredibly interesting artistic proposals out there. But, more often than not, I find the exhibition format itself boring. It feels static. Heavy. Sometimes it even feels dead, and worse, sometimes I think it kills the work.
You go in, you look around, you leave… and once you’re outside, you realise nothing inside you has actually moved. What a shame.
The last thing I would ever want is to condemn my own work to boredom. That simply wouldn’t be true to who I am.
Sometimes I think this dynamic within contemporary art goes hand in hand with the elitism that surrounds it. It often feels as though certain figures within the art world are determined to preserve the distance between the audience and the artwork, simply to protect their own insular estate of opinions and wine glasses.
Those dynamics don’t interest me. That’s precisely why I intend to walk into that estate and tear it apart if I have to.
Throughout these seven days of live production, visitors were able to enter and leave the space as the works evolved. Was there a particular encounter, comment, or reaction that ended up changing the direction of one of the pieces?
The most interesting thing was that everything happening inside that space ended up transforming everything else happening inside it.
The works were carefully planned and extensively sketched beforehand, but they were always open to whatever unfolded in the room. I wanted everything that happened there to become part of the work, not only what I had come to say, but also what every single visitor brought with them.
And that’s exactly what happened. That’s life. If the street has taught me anything, it’s that whatever happens becomes part of you.
Life is short, and I like to think of it as a playground where everyone is invited to play. I don’t want to waste the opportunity to keep playing until my legs finally give out.
There is a performative dimension to this exhibition: the artist’s body, working for more than ten hours a day, becomes almost part of the work itself. To what extent do you see this project as a performance about labour, discipline and presence?
I believe the performative dimension has always been present throughout my work, from poetry to painting. That probably stems from my background in drama studies.
But if I look even further back, to when I was nine years old dancing breakdance or painting graffiti, I can already recognise that performative element. It has always been there, that idea of exhibiting and exposing oneself.
Showing not only the finished artwork but also the artist at work was one of the ways I found to bring the work closer to people.
Your practice constantly questions hierarchies of value: what has been discarded can become art, and the process can be just as meaningful as the finished piece. Do you believe art still has the power to change the way we look at everyday life?
Art is about changing the ordinary way we look at the world until everyday actions become extraordinary, because the simple fact that we are alive is extraordinary.
In truth, it’s much simpler than it seems.
Neo-Expressionism emerged from a moment of emotional intensity and a desire to recover gesture and materiality. What do you find in that pictorial language today, and why does it resonate with the point you’ve reached, both personally and artistically?
As I mentioned before, Expressionism is where I find my vocabulary. It’s the language through which I interpret the world and translate it into my own symbols.
I could develop my work through many other visual languages; in fact, my practice is nourished by many of them, but this is where I feel most comfortable speaking.
I’m not particularly interested in style itself. I’m interested in what is being said.
Style, or form, is simply the consequence of the need to express something. For me, it will never be as important as the message itself. That’s why I try to focus on what I want to say rather than on the language I’m using to say it. Of course, I’m never opposed to refining my technique. It’s all about finding balance.
Many artists speak about protecting the mystery of creation, whereas you decided to open your studio completely and share every stage of the process. Is there still something intimate and impossible to translate within the act of painting?
Making love is an intimate act. I make love to my paintings, and I leave the door open so that anyone who wishes can step inside and witness such a beautiful act.
Opening up the process doesn’t mean giving up my intimacy. The mystery is always there because, quite often, I don’t even know what the next brushstroke will be. I simply allow myself to be carried by the energy and let the magic happen.
A New Artist in the City was conceived as an ongoing project, one that could eventually travel to other galleries and contexts. Looking ahead, where would you like this project to evolve, and what physical, emotional or conceptual territories do you still feel compelled to explore?
I want to continue taking this format to other galleries, both within and beyond Madrid, both inside and outside Spain, and to remain a spectator of whatever unfolds.
Right now, everything I’ve been telling you about resonates deeply with me, and I want to keep developing it. I don’t yet know which emotional or conceptual territories it will lead me to, but I hope it always continues to move something, both out there and within myself.
I hope it continues to question things. And above all, I hope I never lose this feeling of being a child playing in a playground: making mistakes, getting things right, falling in love, sharing a snack, challenging authority, scraping my knees, standing back up, and carrying on playing.
Thank you for your time. I’ll see you out in the streets… Because, in the end, I’ll see you out in life.
