Raquel Mitjans

Your background in psychiatry gives you a particular understanding of perception and the inner world. How has working as a psychiatrist influenced the way you construct images and think about what the viewer sees?

As a psychiatrist, much of my work involves helping people observe their experiences from different perspectives and, at times, find a kinder way of interpreting them. We often tend to become immersed in our inner world and in certain ways of interpreting what happens to us. In many cases, change does not simply come from looking further inward, but from shifting our gaze outward and changing the perspective from which we see the world around us. That shift can profoundly transform our experience and the way we relate to our surroundings.

This has influenced the way I think about images and the viewer’s relationship with them. I am interested in creating moments that invite the viewer to pause and look again, but also to shift their gaze beyond their individual experience. Through contemplation, I seek to open a space in which perception can expand and connect with something beyond our immediate experience.

This idea is where psychiatry and my artistic practice meet: the possibility of pausing, gaining distance, and looking from another perspective.

Raquel Mitjans | Beyond The Eye | 2026

Many of your works place small human figures within or beside dramatically enlarged elements – an eye, a hand, an astronaut’s helmet. What draws you to these shifts in scale, and what do they allow you to express about the individual’s place in the world?

Shifts in scale alter our habitual perception of the importance of things. Something small can appear insignificant beside a gigantic hand, eye, or helmet, yet that contrast can also make the relationship between them more visible.

I am interested in placing the human figure within something that surpasses it without making it irrelevant. The individual is small in relation to the larger scales of time, matter, and the universe, yet at the same time, we are part of them. To me, there is something deeply meaningful in that tension between our apparent smallness and our belonging to something immense.

Altering familiar proportions allows me to make that idea visible in a way that feels more intuitive than literal. It also creates a certain sense of strangeness that invites the viewer to question where the individual truly stands within that world.

Doors, stairs, paths, bubbles, reflections, and other transitional forms appear repeatedly in your imagery. Are you consciously drawn to symbols of passage and thresholds? What do these motifs mean within your practice?

Yes, I am consciously drawn to transitional forms and thresholds, although they do not always take a literal form. Sometimes they may be a portal or a staircase, while at other times that point of passage appears in an eye, a reflection, a frame, or even an astronaut’s visor.

In many of my works, I use these elements as symbols of passage between different states or forms of perception. They suggest a moment in which what we know can open towards something beyond the immediate, towards something that transcends our individual experience. They are spaces of transition, but also of possibility, where the corporeal and the finite can come into relation with something that transcends them.

Raquel Mitjans | Choicesin Time | 2025

Your drawings are predominantly monochrome, yet small areas of colour often become extremely significant. How do you decide where colour should appear, and what role does it play in directing the viewer’s attention or interpretation?

To be honest, the use of colour is not usually something I plan completely in advance. There is an intuitive and emotional element to that process. Once I begin working on a piece, I may realise that a particular element has become visually overshadowed by the scale or intensity of everything surrounding it, even though I feel it deserves to be seen.

Colour then becomes a way of giving that element a different kind of presence. It is not always about making it dominant, but rather about inviting the viewer to discover it and perhaps experience the image from a different point of attention.

Because most of my works are predominantly monochrome, even a very small intervention of colour can carry great significance. In that sense, colour functions almost like a silent interruption: a subtle invitation to look again.

Your work combines a high degree of technical control with surreal and sometimes impossible situations. How do you balance hyperrealistic precision with imagination and ambiguity?

For me, hyperrealism creates a point of connection between the viewer and an image that might otherwise feel too unfamiliar. Even when the situation is impossible, realism gives the viewer something familiar to hold on to.

I am interested in that tension between recognition and uncertainty. The viewer may identify with a hand, an eye, or a human figure, while the context in which those elements exist can challenge their usual sense of reality.

In this way, hyperrealistic precision helps make the symbolic and surreal elements emotionally accessible. I do not want the symbolic world of the image to feel completely distant or foreign. I want the viewer to have a way into it, to feel that, in some way, they also belong within that space.

Raquel Mitjans | Infinite Traces | 2026

You describe the human figure as “a threshold between the individual and something greater”. What is this “something greater” for you – time, nature, the universe, collective experience, or something that deliberately remains undefined?

I tend to think of the universe and time, and of the fact that our individual lives are finite while the matter, cycles, and larger processes of which we are part continue beyond us.

At the same time, I do not want to define that idea too rigidly. For someone else, that “something greater” might be nature, memory, or something much more personal. I like to leave room for the viewer’s own interpretation.

What interests me most is this shift in scale: moving from seeing ourselves solely as isolated individuals to recognising that we exist in relation to something beyond our immediate experience. I hope the work can invite that kind of reflection without telling the viewer exactly what they should find.

Raquel Mitjans | The Orbit | 2026

You began making art at seventeen, but in 2025 decided to approach your practice in a more focused and professional way. What changed for you at that moment, and how has this decision affected the ideas or ambitions behind your work?

I had always enjoyed making art, particularly drawing, but in 2025 I decided to approach my artistic practice in a more focused and intentional way. I wanted to challenge myself both technically and conceptually and begin developing a visual language of my own.

Since then, my ambitions have grown beyond individual works. I am interested in how different pieces can enter into dialogue with one another and gradually build a broader visual universe.