Guillermo Lorca. Esplendor de la Noche

Carrer de Montcada in El Born, a sixteenth-century palace that housed the noble Cervelló family into the eighteenth. Today it holds a private museum of modern and contemporary art, a few doors from the Museu Picasso. The collection runs Banksy, Warhol, Basquiat, Haring, Kusama, KAWS, and Murakami, with a separate section for digital and immersive work.

More interesting than the familiar names is an exhibition that has hung there for years and is easy to miss among the collection rooms: Esplendor de la Noche by Guillermo Lorca, the Chilean painter's first solo show in Europe, curated by Simon de Pury. Six large oil paintings across two rooms.

Lorca, born in Santiago in 1984, went to Norway in 2006 and worked with Odd Nerdrum. It shows: old-master technique, dark grounds, glazes — and within them motifs that refuse to sit still. Children among giant cats and flowers, animals that protect or threaten depending on how long you look. Two of the works extend into an augmented-reality layer through an app.

The friction between the collection and this exhibition is the revealing part. The museum sells itself on accessibility and reports reaching many people visiting a museum for the first time. Lorca's paintings ask for the opposite: time, distance, a second look.