From Barcelona to London, almost to hide. From London to the world. This, in summary, is the story of Álvaro Picardo who, at 53, became famous for his hand-painted lamps.
In November 2020, Picardo lives in the Pimlico neighborhood in London, where he arrives very young, to fully experience his homosexuality. His father died in April, the pandemic has been going on for a few months and his main connection with the world is a writing workshop that he signs up for to pass the time. She doesn’t love the result although he helps her in the process.
Until one day, on top of these leaves, he begins to paint. Geometric designs that another day anyone tries to use to recover an old lamp. From this moment, he begins to paint all the lamps he finds at home. Today his Instagram account @handpainted_lampshades has almost 8 thousand followers and his work, as “El País” tells us, has interested “World of Interiors”, “Colefax and Fowler”, Luke Edward Hall and many more.
But it is the concept behind his passion that conquers us. Picardo explains: “I attach a lot of value to the artisan theme. It makes me very sad to see how it is being lost. I am a defender of individuality, differentiation, handmade things, and an enemy of machines, that we are all equal, that we cannot express who we are. One of the things that excites me is that the lamps are each different, they have imperfections that add value to them, they do not take away from them.” “I like the theme,” he adds, “because it is a way of taking an object that is forgotten and left in a corner and giving it a personality, a presence, that helps decorate at the same time that it has a function, which is to give birth. The superfluous does not attract me as much as the function, I am very rational.”