"When design reaches its minimum expression and, at the same time, its maximum functionality — that's when I know something is truly well designed."
— SpY
SpY doesn't give interviews easily. He doesn't appear on panels or post selfies. His Instagram shows the work — large-scale installations that stop people mid-stride in cities across the world — but never the face behind them. That quiet resolve is part of the work itself.
Over more than three decades, SpY has evolved from graffiti writer to one of the most compelling voices in contemporary public art. His installations don't just occupy space; they dialogue with it. Objects that trigger a double-take, then a deeper look. A grid of 150 fake security cameras on a Madrid building facade — installed, as he put it, with the intention of not watching over anything. A luminous red sphere split into two identical hemispheres in Xi'an, mounted on industrial scaffolding, with a narrow threshold between them that visitors walk through — stepping into the literal point of fracture. A sphere of 90 convex traffic mirrors placed before the Pyramids of Giza, fragmenting the ancient landscape back at itself. His studio, SpY Studio, operates like a laboratory — technical specialists, craftspeople, and an obsessive attention to concept working in tandem — producing work that has appeared in cities from Madrid to New York, Tokyo to Mumbai.
We were drawn to SpY for the same reason we're always drawn to people who have developed a genuine relationship with cities on their own terms. He moves through urban environments with a particular kind of attention — trained, curious, unhurried. And in a world that rarely slows down, that quality still feels radical.
A Studio in Madrid, Between Plants and Cats
On the day we speak with him, SpY was in his Madrid studio. In front of a screen, writing, surrounded by plants and cats. It's a detail that feels right — a quiet interiority that mirrors the precision of his public work.
When he's not traveling, his life moves at a calm pace, guided mostly by what his body asks for. He sleeps eight hours. Wakes without an alarm, more or less at the same time each day. Small morning rituals, breakfast, planning the workday. Then the work itself.
He tries to keep mornings productive, leaving afternoons open. Time to research, study, walk, do sports, or just breathe. It's a structure he holds carefully, and consciously. "When I travel, the rhythm obviously changes and depends heavily on the country or culture I'm in," he says. "But I still try to maintain my routines, adapted to the trip, and hold some discipline whenever I can."
There's something in that balance — structure and adaptation, discipline and openness — that feels very much like the way his art works. A clear framework. An unexpected encounter.
The City as a Living Entity
SpY's relationship with cities began with graffiti. Moving through streets as a young writer sharpened his way of observing urban environments in ways that never really left him.
"Thanks to graffiti practice from a young age, my way of observing the city became much more acute," he says. "That led me to understand urban environments as frameworks for action — for my current public artworks."
On long walks through cities around the world, he tries to stay open to the dialogue between context and the life happening inside it. What he notices, again and again, is that cities are never static. They evolve. They carry conflict and transformation inside them, and they behave like living entities — and everything that happens within them eventually finds its way into the work.
That idea resonates with what we keep thinking about at SOTIYO. The city not as backdrop, but as a place you're in genuine conversation with. Not a destination, but a flow you read, respond to, and are changed by in return.
What Stays With You
The moments that stay with SpY aren't tied so much to places as to what he experiences — or who he experiences them with.
There are moments of stillness: when you slow down, simplify, find alignment with yourself. Moments of genuine connection with people — honesty, humility, unexpected kindness. Moments where you pause long enough to find beauty in simple things.
Then there are the harder ones. Moments of fog, where instinct has to lead because knowledge runs out. Moments of challenge, where you learn to integrate the unfamiliar into yourself.
"In this attention crisis we're all exposed to, I value these pauses and simple gestures more and more," he says.
It's worth sitting with that. An artist whose work exists in public space — designed to interrupt the rhythm of daily life — talking about the value of the pause. The interruption isn't the point. The noticing is.
On Losing the Map — and Gaining Everything Else
One of SpY's most vivid recollections involves his first trip to Japan. No English. Almost no one to help. Barely a sign he could read. A country famously generous and hospitable, yet entirely illegible to him.
"In those moments, all your senses are awake, alert, and open to the present moment," he says.
There's something he misses about that kind of travel — the exploration, the feeling of being lost, the closer connection with people, the heightened awareness that comes when you can't rely on your phone to mediate the experience.
Mobile technology has made movement enormously easier. But it has also quietly dimmed something. The senses go a little soft when the friction disappears.
Getting lost used to be the point. And maybe it still is.
Minimum Form, Maximum Function
When it comes to objects, SpY has a clear point of view.
He tends to think things are worth more for what they mean than for what they are. But in practical terms, he's direct: design has a primary objective, and that's making something useful. Whether it's an object or a space.
"Good designs tend to be innovative, understandable, and durable," he says. "For me, there's something fundamental: when design reaches its minimum expression and, at the same time, its maximum functionality."
After that, aesthetic criteria do their work — resonating more or less depending on personal taste. But if a design is useful, honest, and coherent, most people intuitively sense that it's solving something real.
He also draws a careful line between design and art. Design, in his view, tends to be oriented toward problem-solving. Art operates on a different plane — one that doesn't necessarily have to fulfill a function and can, he says with a kind of affection, "allow itself to be perfectly useless."
It's a distinction worth holding. And one that quietly clarifies what we're reaching for at SOTIYO: objects that solve real problems with the least possible noise. Not art, not decoration. Just things that move with you – a line of thinking we've explored further in The New Era of Travel Comfort.
Anonymity as Comfort
We asked SpY about comfort — what it means when you're in motion.
His answer wasn't about ergonomics or lightweight materials. It was about privacy.
"There's something I feel tremendously comfortable with, and that's protecting my personal privacy in relation to my work as an artist. Working anonymously in an era when privacy is barely an option anymore gives me quality time and a great freedom of movement. For me, it's simply a form of comfort in these times of digital hyperexposure."
Freedom of movement — not just physical, but cognitive and creative. The ability to move through a city, through daily life, without the weight of visibility. In an age where attention is currency, choosing not to trade it feels like a quiet act of clarity.
Emptying Out to Move Forward
One of SpY's most useful tools for breaking out of autopilot is, on the surface, almost the opposite of productivity: cultivating boredom.
Every day starts at zero. He tries to stay curious and awake. But when he senses himself entering cruise control, he doesn't push through. He stops.
"There's nothing better than pausing and cultivating boredom when you feel like you're going on autopilot. Emptying yourself of tasks, goals, and purposes — and simply stopping to do simple things with your hands — cools my head. And suddenly many points start connecting and ideas begin flowing that previously seemed blocked or stuck."
Empty hands. Full attention. It's a discipline that requires more courage than most productivity systems.
What Comes Next
SpY's next destination isn't a city — it's a question.
He wants to keep exploring new formats: new concepts, new dialogues, new tools, new strategies for prompting reflection. He's interested in understanding how perception processes experience through the senses as qualities of consciousness — and how to carry that into the territory of art.
Not a fixed destination. A direction. Movement with intention.
The Space Between the Work and the World
SpY's story holds something we keep coming back to: the idea that the most honest relationship you can have with a city is an observational one. Not consuming it. Not performing in it. Just learning to read it.
He's spent decades doing exactly that — and it shows in work that doesn't shout, but stops you. That uses the city's own logic to make you see it differently.
We're interested in the same territory. The in-between spaces. The transitions. The gestures that shape everyday life but rarely get named. And the way a well-designed object can disappear into your movement rather than demand attention.
What SpY reminds us is that moving well — through cities, through work, through life — is less about optimization and more about staying genuinely awake to what's around you. About valuing the pause. Protecting the conditions for real attention. And remembering, as he puts it, that everything that happens, in some way, makes us grow.
Explore more of SpY's work at spy-urbanart.com or follow SpY Studio on Instagram.
All content is property of SpY and photographer Rubén P. Bescós.
Please contact SpY for commissions, requests, and press information.
If this conversation resonated, you might also enjoy our talk with Pablo Serret de Ena on movement as rhythm and curiosity as refuge — another perspective on how creative people develop a relationship with the spaces they move through.
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