MEMBER FEATURE:

Our monthly Member Feature aims to showcase the talent that occupies our buildings and celebrate their work.

This month, we are excited to feature Rockella Space Member Guillermo Serrano Amat, a painter who has a studio at One Eyed Studios, whose work explores the psychological, theatrical, and often absurd dimensions of everyday life. Born in Spain and trained at Atelier Artium Peña in Madrid before earning his MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art, Guillermo brings together rigorous painterly skill, art-historical awareness, and a deeply narrative approach to image-making. His paintings are populated by scammers, psychics, musicians, and idlers—figures drawn from memory, observation, fantasy, and popular culture, suspended somewhere between tragedy and dark humor.

Working largely from imagination rather than direct observation, Guillermo constructs scenes that feel at once familiar and slightly unmoored. New York neighborhoods like Ridgewood and Red Hook become fertile ground for these unfolding dramas—not as documentary settings, but as internalized landscapes shaped by daily movement, recollection, and invention. Influenced by the Spanish literary tradition of Esperpento, his work exaggerates emotional and psychological states to their breaking point, using distortion, theatricality, and narrative density to reveal deeper truths about human behavior and lived experience.

Guillermo’s paintings function like compressed films: multiple characters, parallel storylines, and conflicting energies collide within a single frame. Through deliberate manipulations of scale, perspective, and resolution—where forms dissolve at the edges and brushstrokes assert themselves as memory—he guides viewers through spaces that feel animated, unstable, and alive. Humor plays a vital role, not as satire or moral critique, but as a way to heighten emotion and illuminate the absurdity embedded in ordinary moments.

Rather than offering moral lessons or social prescriptions, Guillermo’s work reflects what it feels like to exist in a particular place and time. His paintings invite viewers to slow down and notice the gestures, encounters, and details so commonplace they often go unseen—revealing how, in moments of exaggeration and absurdity, our most human qualities come sharply into focus.

To learn more about the creatives who call Rockella Space home, head over to the People page for a full list of in-depth interviews.

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Guillermo Serrano Amat, and I am a figurative oil painter born in Salamanca, Spain. I went to New York to pursue a Master’s program in painting at the New York Academy of Art. After graduating, I had my first solo at Harkawik Gallery.

How long have you been at Rockella Space, and what do you value most about having a studio at One Eyed Studios—particularly in terms of community and connection with other artists in the building?

I’ve been here since March 2024. The studios are cozy and beautiful, mine is beamed with natural light, and everything is perfectly finished.  The common areas are great, everything is clean and functional. There’s one other Alumni from the New York Academy in the building, as well as a ceramicist I’ve known for a while, and that first introduced me to the space. The open studios were a good opportunity to get to know others.

What does having a dedicated space at One Eyed Studios mean for your creative process? Has it changed how you approach your projects?

Having my own space has become an essential part of my creative process. It has allowed me to get more ambitious with my work and experiment more. It made me realize how much I needed to paint on my own.

Tell us about your work. What inspires you to do what you do?

My inspiration mostly comes from spaces that are known to me; places that I inhabit and I walk frequently, as well as people I come across: the knowledge of those places and people is a mix of my direct observations, the stories that I develop in my mind at that moment, and the narratives that I bring with me.

I try to find a balance between those characters and mannerisms that come from direct observation, those from my fantasy and memory, and those from popular culture. I want to convey something that feels real in its own terms, but getting too close to the actual reality throws me off, and I always try to avoid it.

Your paintings are populated by scammers, psychics, and ecstatic musicians—figures that seem both tragic and absurd. What draws you to these kinds of characters?

On a superficial level, there is the fact that I do enjoy how those figures look. They are aesthetically pleasing to me. However, to me, this stylistic choice goes beyond that: I am very interested in human interactions, their history, and the history of the characters and the spaces they inhabit. Storytelling, a plethora of mixed stories that operate on different levels, is at the core of my work, and by choosing these extreme characters,

I exaggerate their emotional and psychological inner state -the same way actors used to do it in the silent film era- that information is not only conveyed, but elevated to its higher pitch. What seems like an exaggeration is just the highlight of that very element that predates the entire personality or circumstances of an individual, and better expresses it at any given moment.

You’ve described working entirely from memory and imagination. What does that process look like day to day? How do you begin a painting when you’re not working from direct observation?

I take sketches on site, and I take photos. I do use some references, but never in the early stages of the painting. I want every object, gesture, and character to take shape out of my own recollections. Using the reference too early on can kill my own way of seeing it. Once I have it out there in their basic shape, I will refer to such references, but only if I need them to be very specific for some reason.

The “Esperpento” tradition plays a major role in your practice. What about its blend of tragedy and grotesque humor resonates with you in today’s world?

The “Esperpento” is a literary movement that started at the dawn of the 20th century in Spain. Its founder, Valle-Inclán, defined it as a classical tragedy played by ridiculous and deformed heroes. The sociological and Historical circumstances that allowed for the flourishing of this genre are not unlike those we experience today: total demoralization, distrust in societal structures, and the impending feeling that an imminent catastrophe is about to fall upon us. I am not a pessimist, but there’s a rejoice in the revealing of certain dismal aspects of daily life, and that’s an attitude I share with Esperpento. Humor serves as a tool to keep that heightened emotion, that exaggerated psychological turmoil.

Your characters often seem exaggerated yet deeply human. How do you navigate that fine line between satire and empathy?

Both things are not exclusive. The grotesque element is an expression of individuality and originality, anything that comes from a truly personal drive, and it is not necessarily a negative thing. Even when it takes a sinister turn, and it becomes something I wouldn’t necessarily want to keep around me in my daily life, it is still something that interests me deeply and where I want to put all my attention. Anything that departs from the consensus of what one can expect when stepping out into the street. I feel by highlighting those, I am capable of delving more into the passions that actually shape quotidian experience, and that it is in absurd moments that our deepest nature is most visible.

Many of your scenes are set in New York neighborhoods like Ridgewood and Red Hook. What do you see or feel in these places that makes them fertile ground for your work?

They are just the places where my daily life occurs. Once I get familiar with someplace (that is, once I get to create an image of it in my mind), I naturally feel drawn to reproduce it in my paintings.

Your paintings balance cinematic dynamism with art-historical density. How do you approach composition to achieve that sense of unfolding narrative?

For me, composition has to be expansive enough to hold multiple characters and parallel narratives at once. I’m not interested in a single, stable viewpoint; I want the image to function more like a field in which different events coexist and collide. To achieve that, it’s often necessary to compress or fold space—distorting perspective, exaggerating scale, and forcing angles that wouldn’t resolve cleanly in a classical construction.

These distortions aren’t stylistic gestures for their own sake. They’re practical tools that allow the painting to remain legible while accommodating narrative density. By bending spatial logic, I can guide the viewer’s eye through the image in a controlled sequence, almost cinematically, while still allowing multiple readings and points of entry.

Your palette recalls the Neue Sachlichkeit painters, but your brushwork feels very contemporary. How do color and texture function in creating the psychological charge of your scenes?

Color, for me, works with an internal logic. There has to be coherence in the world of the painting (light, material, atmosphere) so that the image holds together as a space you can enter and believe in. Within that framework, color does a lot of work, but it does so indirectly. It supports structure, hierarchy, rhythm, and spatial clarity rather than creating any sort of psychological charge.

If emotion emerges, it’s a byproduct of the situation, the relationships between figures, and the tension in the composition, not something imposed chromatically.

There’s a strong sense of theatricality in your work, almost like watching a play unfold on canvas. Do you think of yourself as staging performances in paint?

I definitely do! More than a play, I think of a movie. I get to direct dozens of characters in every painting and condense an entire story, maybe 20 entire stories, in a single image.

Your paintings can “break down” at their edges, faces dissolving, smoke becoming a memory of a brushstroke. What role does this disintegration play in your storytelling?

I think sometimes it’s necessary to break away from my tendency to be a close form painter, where I just want to complete every single detail about every element in the painting. Discerning what needs detail from other areas that can just be resolved quickly (and much more effectively) through expressive brushstrokes is very important. The differences in resolution create dynamism, helping the eye move through the composition.

Do you think of your paintings as moral tales, social satires, or simply mirrors of human absurdity?

I’m not interested at all in moralizing, and the social satire is also not a big element in my work, although it’s probably there in some way. I wanna reflect on how it feels to be alive in a specific environment and a specific moment in time.

As a Spanish-born artist now painting the American social landscape, how do you view the idea of the “American Dream” in your paintings?

I’ve never thought about the American Dream while making a painting, nor do the characters seem too concerned with it. The way the people in my paintings go about their lives could be the same as any other place in the world, except for obvious aesthetic details…

Your work straddles memory, myth, and the present moment. What do you hope viewers carry with them after stepping into your painted worlds?

Hopefully, they will begin noticing stuff they didn’t pay much attention to before. I strive to capture the gestures, moments, details, or ideas so trivial and common that most people have never even given them a single thought, even though they’re part of their every minute.

If you were to invite anyone alive or dead to a dinner party, who would be on your guest list?

David Lynch, Luis Buñuel, the entire team behind the early seasons of The Simpsons…

What would you say to artists from similar backgrounds who dream of moving to New York and building a career in the art world?

That it is possible, and that there are many resources available (in the form of scholarships, awards, etc) to make that happen.

What projects/exhibitions have you got coming up?

I’m gonna be in a group show at Harper’s Gallery in January! It will open on January 14th at their Upper East Side location.

Where can people see your work in IRL or online, and how can people contact you for a studio visit? 

www.guillermoart.com

instagram: @guillermoesea