Carlos Arriaga (Madrid, 1958) has spent decades crafting an artistic language that defies classic categorization. He is widely known for an innovative technique that merges photography with oil painting, a hybrid method that allows him to paint directly over his own black-and-white photographs. The result is neither a photograph nor a traditional painting: it is a layered, emotionally charged visual experience where documentation meets imagination.

This “dual discipline”, where the precision of photography becomes the structural foundation and painting adds depth, atmosphere, and symbolic resonance, has become Arriaga’s signature. His work mirrors the complex world we inhabit, a world undergoing profound social, environmental, and emotional transformations.

Today, from Milan to Madrid and beyond, his artworks have been exhibited in galleries, art fairs, private collections, and major events like Art Madrid’25. Through international platforms, Arriaga’s audience spans continents, yet his themes remain intimate, human, and profoundly contemporary.

Art Between Two Worlds: Photography and Painting

At the core of Arriaga’s practice lies a remarkable union between figurative photography and abstract, atmospheric painting.

He begins with a photograph, often a stark urban scene, an architectural detail, a fractured sky. This image becomes the structural skeleton. Over it, he applies layers of oil, pencil, and glaze, not to conceal but to transform. These layers add motion, tension, and emotional gravity.

The result oscillates between:

• Reality and interpretation

• Documentation and imagination

• Urban memory and symbolic dreamscape

Each piece evolves into a kind of “emotional geography,” where the visible world reveals its hidden psychological dimensions.

This fusion gives Arriaga’s work a depth that is both visual and existential: serene yet troubled, familiar yet uncanny.

Cities as Human Mirrors

One of the most recurring themes in Arriaga’s work is the city, not simply as an architectural environment, but as a metaphor for human identity, memory, and vulnerability.

His cityscapes are never passive. They breathe. They erode. They testify.

He captures:

• The silent rhythm of abandoned streets

• The fragility behind towering structures

• The tension between progress and decay

For Arriaga, the urban landscape is an inner landscape. Cities become psychological mirrors, reflecting the anxieties and hopes of the societies that build them.

This duality, between the city as structure and the city as soul, is one of the strongest threads running through his long career.

Nature Returns: The Environmental Narrative

Parallel to his exploration of the metropolis, Arriaga’s work increasingly engages with nature and atmospheric fragility.

This evolution marks a significant shift toward an environmental narrative, one rooted in the urgency of our times. Many of his pieces now feel like ecological warnings wrapped in beauty: skies darkened by unseen forces, city silhouettes swallowed by atmospheric tension, and landscapes where nature resurfaces as a quiet yet unstoppable force.

As he describes:

“The skies I portray, often darkened or almost unreal, are not simply aesthetic choices; they are metaphors for the state of our environment and the consequences of human intervention.”

And he continues:

“They remind us that climate change and environmental degradation are not abstract concepts, but urgent realities that affect us all.”

In these works, beauty coexists with unease, a deliberate tension meant to awaken, not to soothe.

The “Trans Photography” Series: Atmosphere in Mutation

In recent years, Arriaga has embarked on a bold new artistic direction: Trans Photography.

This series pushes his visual language toward pure experimental territory. The images play with opacity, translucence, inversion, and color tension. Skies seem torn open. Horizons dissolve. Light becomes shadow and shadow becomes light.

Technically, the process is daring: a positive becomes a negative, reminiscent of silver-halide film, but enhanced with digital painting. Colors shift toward their complements. The world appears inverted, transformed, disrupted, yet strangely harmonious.

The emotional effect is profound:

• Beauty mixed with impending transformation

• Atmospheric instability rendered as poetry

• Urban silhouettes recast in surreal, luminous tones

In these works, Arriaga abandons physical reference points to focus entirely on symbolic and emotional forces.

It is a natural evolution of his earlier style: Where his painted photographs integrated reality and intervention, Trans Photography explores transformation through light, color, and abstraction alone.

A World After Us: Urban Ruins and Nature’s Quiet Rebellion

Many pieces in this recent trajectory imagine cities long after human disappearance.

In these apocalyptic yet serene visions:

• Time has passed.

• Humanity has vanished.

• Only traces of our disorder remain.

Nature, persistent and patient, reclaims what was taken:

Roots coil around monuments. Vines shatter concrete. Trees rise from avenues once filled with noise.

It is not destruction, it is rebalancing.

Arriaga captures this moment between endings and beginnings, a silent act of resistance where beauty and warning coexist.

As he explains:

“The cityscapes I create speak of imbalance and transformation. They invite the viewer to reflect on how far we have distanced ourselves from nature and how urgently we must restore that connection.”

These works confront us with an unavoidable truth: The future is uncertain, but still filled with possibility if we choose to listen.

Technique: The Inversion of Light

One of the most innovative aspects of Arriaga’s recent work is his manipulation of light and inversion.

Lights become shadows. Shadows become lights. Colors mutate into their spectral opposites.

This inversion transforms the familiar into the uncanny, offering viewers a glimpse of a world “almost turned upside down.”

The technique draws on historical photographic processes but is expanded with contemporary digital tools, a bridge between analog memory and digital futurism.

It is a unique technique in the world, one that Arriaga has mastered with extraordinary precision.

Trajectory, Exhibitions, and Legacy

Carlos Arriaga’s presence spans decades of exhibitions, gallery shows, art fairs, and private collections. His works have been shown in:

• Flecha

• Galería de Arte Contemporáneo

• Art Madrid’25

• And numerous international online platforms

His trajectory reflects a singular commitment to truth, beauty, and transformation, a constant search for a visual language that speaks to the heart of our era.

Arriaga stands as a contemporary artist in perpetual evolution, merging traditional craftsmanship with digital experimentation, always pushing the boundaries of what it means to look, remember, and imagine.

Conclusion: A World in Transformation

Carlos Arriaga’s art doesn’t simply depict transformation, it embodies it.

Through cityscapes turned into metaphors, skies charged with emotional turbulence, and experimental photographic techniques that invert reality, his work urges viewers to reflect on our relationship with the world, with nature, and with ourselves.

He shows us that transformation is not destruction, it is transition. A shift in light. A rebalancing of forces. A call toward responsibility and renewal.

In a time when the future feels unstable, his art reminds us that even in upheaval, beauty can emerge, layered, evolving, and alive.