Guillermo Lorca. Two Quiet Rooms Next to Banksy

Children among giant cats and flowers, set against dark grounds and built up in glazes like an old master's. Whether the animals protect or threaten depends on how long you look. At the Moco Museum Barcelona, Guillermo Lorca's "Esplendor de la Noche" ("Splendour of the Night") was more interesting than the famous names in the collection, and easy to miss among them.

The Moco is a private museum of modern and contemporary art in the Palau dels Cervelló on Carrer de Montcada, in El Born, a few doors from the Museu Picasso. The noble Cervelló family lived in the sixteenth-century palace into the eighteenth century. The collection runs to Banksy, Warhol, Basquiat, Haring, Kusama, KAWS and Murakami, with a separate section for digital and immersive work. The museum sells itself on accessibility and says it reaches many people who have never been to a museum before.

Lorca's show had already hung there for years, six large oil paintings across two rooms, the Chilean painter's first solo exhibition in Europe, curated by Simon de Pury. Born in Santiago in 1984, Lorca moved to Norway in 2006 and worked with Odd Nerdrum. You can see it in the old-master technique, with its dark grounds and glazes. The subjects don't fit that manner. The technique promises calm, the giant cats ignore the promise, and the paintings get their charge from that mismatch.

An app adds an augmented-reality layer to two of the works. The shift that matters happens without a device, though, as long as you give the paintings time.

Among the famous names Lorca's paintings keep rather quiet, and in this museum quiet is a handicap. Anyone who comes for Banksy walks straight past the two rooms, and past the pictures in the building that most reward patience.

Guillermo Lorca, "Esplendor de la Noche", Moco Museum Barcelona, Carrer de Montcada.