From the white villages of Andalusia

OriGen by Antonio León

The man who decided to cook his own paint

Some people inherit a trade.
Antonio León inherited a landscape.

He was born and raised in El Viso del Alcor, in the countryside outside Seville, among limewashed walls and white courtyards, in a tradition that for generations had used lime not only to protect houses, but to let them breathe.

Those walls left him with a question.

Why had modern paint walked away from a material that had worked for centuries?

Antonio studied chemistry and began his career in the coatings industry, first in R&D and later as technical director of a major paint company operating in Spain and Morocco. But the more he learned about the industry, the clearer one thing became: he didn’t want to simply use recipes that others had developed.

He wanted to create his own.

One sentence sums up how he thinks about innovation:

“I don’t want anyone cooking for me. I want to cook my own food.”

Antonio León

For Antonio, formulating has always meant exactly that: knowing the raw materials, understanding how they behave, experimenting, getting it wrong, going back to the lab and designing a solution of his own.

In 2009 he laid the first stone of IEdiSA, the company where he began researching and recovering the potential of traditional lime-based materials. For years he worked on mineral formulations, collaborating with specialists and universities, until he arrived at an even more ambitious question:

What would happen if lime and one of the most advanced materials in modern science could work together?

The answer was Graphenstone.

The brand was born in 2013, and with it a new generation of mineral paints and coatings that combined the tradition of lime with graphene technology. An ancient raw material became the starting point for a new way of formulating paint. In the years that followed, the project traveled from El Viso del Alcor to markets in Europe, Asia, the Americas and beyond, and Graphenstone became an international reference in mineral, sustainable paint.

But for Antonio, it was never just a paint.

It was a way of proving that tradition and science don’t have to compete.
They can complement each other.

In 2019 he broadened that vision by founding TALES Technology, focused on indoor air quality and well-being in places like schools and workplaces. The question was the same as ever: if we spend so much of our lives inside buildings, why not also study the air we breathe in them?

And then came OriGen.

OriGen is a new chapter on the same path: going back to the origin in order to move forward.

Lime is still the starting point. But now it comes with everything learned over more than two decades of lab work, formulation, manufacturing and job sites: mineral chemistry, graphene, carbonates, silicates, new formulation technologies and a constant obsession with achieving more with less.

Mineral paints.
Limewash.
Plasters.
Primers.
Complete systems.

All formulated from the same philosophy: don’t simply accept existing recipes. Understand them, question them and create better ones.

Because Antonio León never wanted to be just a paint manufacturer. He wanted to be a formulator.

He wanted to understand what goes into a product, why it works, what can be improved and how to give every raw material a purpose.

From the white walls of El Viso del Alcor to graphene.
From a traditional craft to the laboratory.
From age-old lime to the materials of the future.

OriGen was born from that union. From returning to the origin without going back.

And from a conviction Antonio has held since day one:

“I don’t want anyone cooking for me. I want to design my own recipes.”

Antonio León