Carlos Arriaga’s path begins in Madrid and expands across New York, London and many other cities. Photography was his first language: he worked for magazines and advertising agencies, traveling to more than thirty countries and learning to read light, architecture and human stories through the camera.
In parallel, he studied painting and classical drawing. Around 2015 he found the method that would define his work: printing black-and-white photographs on canvas or similar supports and then painting over them in oil. The result is neither pure photograph nor pure painting, but a hybrid image that combines documentary precision with expressive colour and gesture.
Through this process, he turns cities into mental and emotional landscapes. Streets, bridges and skylines become metaphors for movement, memory and identity, reflecting how our lives are constantly being rebuilt, like layers of paint over an image that never fully disappears.
For Carlos, photography is structure: composition, light, and the precise vocabulary of the city. Painting is emotion: colour, time and the slower act of looking. In his studio, the two are layered together using grisaille and glazes: first he builds a monochrome base of light and shadow, then adds transparent layers of oil colour to create depth, texture and atmosphere.
This method allows him to control every nuance of the image while still letting accidents happen on the surface. The city becomes both a document and a dream; a place we recognise and, at the same time, a landscape that feels strangely new.
Arriaga often speaks of cities as living archives: they store our fears, joys, migrations and desires. Madrid, New York and London are not just backdrops; they are characters that shape his way of seeing. Instead of reproducing what already exists, he re-composes the urban space, stretching it, compressing it, tilting it towards something more poetic and open.
In an era marked by climate change, urban crisis and constant movement, his work reflects cities in transition. Skies intensify, reflections distort, colour shifts from natural to almost visionary. The paintings become a conversation about how we inhabit space and how space, in turn, inhabits us.
A recurring idea in Carlos’s work is the tension between nature and the urban fabric. Many of his compositions imagine cities where rivers, trees and parks reclaim the spaces once dominated by asphalt and stone. Streets soften into green corridors, monuments are surrounded by water or vegetation, and the built environment becomes more porous and fragile.
This vision of an “Ideal City” is not a utopia of perfection, but a proposal for balance: a place where nature and architecture coexist instead of competing. By subtly altering perspectives, colours and atmospheres, he invites viewers to rethink their relationship with the city, not as a fixed object, but as something that can still be redesigned, healed and transformed.
In recent years, Arriaga has expanded his visual vocabulary using AI-generated images as raw material. This technology gives him access to endless scenes, interiors, landscapes and urban views from around the world, which he then filters, selects and reinterprets through his own technique. It is another way of travelling and collecting cities, while preserving a very personal, handmade finish on the final canvas.
Carlos Arriaga is a visual artist who lives between cities, light and time. Trained between Madrid, New York and London, he works at the intersection of photography and oil painting to reinvent urban landscapes as emotional and symbolic spaces