The Practice
Emotion as the only valid origin of image-making.
Marcellis Atellis is the artistic name of Marc Golab — an architect and visual artist working from Barcelona, and the founder of Emotionalism.
Emotionalism acts as a counter-gesture to today's automated, AI-driven visual culture. In a moment where images can be generated instantly, the work insists on slowness, materiality, and the irreplaceable depth of human emotion as the basis of image-making.
The practice rejects compositional planning entirely. No sketches, no references, no mood boards. Each painting begins with an emotional state and ends when that state has been transferred — completely, honestly — to the surface.
Organised across four series — Pure Emotionalism, Emotional Landscape, Emotional Minimalism, and Miguel Around the World — the body of work explores how colour, texture, and atmospheric abstraction can function as a language of inner states.
The Dual-State Painting
Two lives within one surface.
At the centre of the practice is a framework in which each work exists in two distinct perceptual conditions — unlit and illuminated — revealing different emotional registers within the same physical surface.
Light does not decorate the work. It activates it. When backlit, the canvas reveals hidden layers, shifted colours, or entirely new compositions.
Rooted in an architectural understanding of light, this method reframes the canvas not as a fixed image, but as a field of transition — between opacity and revelation, between what is felt and what becomes visible.