The deep fascination with the landscape that the Pre-Raphaelites once felt, their thoroughness and their poetics permeate the works of Carol Moreno. Also the American luminists of the 19th century. Like them, the painter is a romantic who takes the luxury of dwelling on the details and spending time observing them. She paints on canvas, but above all she makes large murals directly on the wall to capture dreamlike landscapes that have seduced stars like Rolling Stone Ron Wood and have made her something like the resident artist of the Palace of Barcelona.

For this hotel, Carol Moreno has illustrated the Arts Suites – dedicated to painting, dance, architecture, literature, sculpture and music through characters with a close relationship with the Palace (formerly the Ritz). Hers are the portraits of personalities such as Dalí, Josephine Baker or Carlos Ruiz Zafón. The clouds of the gigantic Gran Via room (it has 250 square meters) have also come out of her hand, which on her day Dalí himself offered to paint. Or the murals in the romantic Winter Garden, located in the hotel’s Rooftop Garden, which offers the feeling of being in a garden greenhouse.

The new owner of this 1919 building, the Algerian Ali Haddad (he bought the property from Joan Gaspar), chose as the emblem and signature of the oldest five-star hotel in the city the exquisite palawan pheasant that appears on the Japanese-inspired walls that Moreno painted directly on the walls of the Cugat salon and which give the impression of being created on a fine silk canvas.

Now, the artist returns to the Palace, but this time as an illustrious guest, to show her latest works, which she brings together under the title Two Visions. The artist travels to Cambodia, the Costa Brava, the Collserola mountain range or the Ebro Delta, and her cracked paintings are like doors to the forests, ponds, wild gardens, rivers and stormy skies that the artist has traveled.

“I know my vision, what I want to say, but I am interested in the viewer’s vision,” explains Moreno in front of his work Caryatides, and assures that “sometimes I see the landscape in black and white and other times in color, even though it is the same.” environment”, hence the title of his latest exhibition, Two Visions, twenty works that will be at the Palace until next May 7 and where the most realistic and abstract atmospheres intermingle, as in the work Mist.

Carol Moreno (Barcelona, ??1975) wanted to dedicate herself to painting since she was little, but her father’s “realism” led her to study marketing and advertising. She did not give up, however, in her vocation, and her marketing knowledge served to give her a boost: “I specialized in decoration, and I skipped the galleries to offer my services directly, without intermediaries,” she explains. .

Today she is a muralist and painter sought after by interior designers such as Jaime Beriestain, Lázaro Rosa Violán or Azul Tierra and companies – including Mahou, Gastón y Daniela or the wallpaper and fabric publisher Coordonné. Her landscapes outside of time (and sometimes seasons) bring any environment closer to nature, “which she is a great teacher,” explains this artist.