How Clementina Bicicleta was born from Pau Tena, artist, mechanic, and cycling enthusiast
Pau Tena, owner and founder of the Catalan bicycle brand Clementina Bicicleta, lives in Barcelona and designs high-performance racing bikes. But that definition only tells part of the story. With a background linked to both cycling and art, Pau creates custom bicycles, conceived according to the rider and their needs, with a clear focus on performance and adaptability across disciplines, an innovative way of working, often in contrast to current market trends.
Text: Juliana Reis, photos: Clementina Bicicleta
Talking with Pau Tena is like opening a history book. His life journey flows directly into Clementina Bicicletes, a brand created with his own hands and born from his experience. Thanks to his parents, he grew up with a deep artistic sensitivity, discovered cycling out of pure passion, and over time became a professional mechanic and painter. At Clementina, these three worlds meet. The result is a handmade, rider-centered bicycle, where, as Pau often says, the cyclist is the true core of the piece, shaped by knowledge and lived experience.
Tena began as a painter. At seven years old, he started attending an art academy on Verdi Street in Gràcia. At fifteen, he held his first exhibition and continued along that artistic path until his thirties, when he admitted that art had become more about commerce than creativity. From then on, he dedicated himself fully to mechanics and worked as a mechanic for the Spanish Paralympic team. He attended several World Championships and witnessed firsthand the Spanish team winning Olympic medals.
“As a mechanic,” Tena recalls, “I entered the world of adaptive cycling, the most demanding category there is. There’s no market for it. You have to build everything from scratch.”
Renaissance
His background is key to understanding how he conceives bicycles, especially his focus on placing the human being at the center. “When you study art history, you inevitably reach the Renaissance,” he explains, “a time when the human being became the driving force of creation. There was technological and artistic development at the same time, always from a deeply humanist perspective.” This viewpoint would go on to define Clementina’s philosophy.
For Pau, handcrafted bicycles are not merely an aesthetic matter. The bikes he builds are as fast and efficient as those from major brands, yet their production is grounded in what he can personally accomplish in his small neighborhood workshop in Barcelona. Each bicycle is a local, precise, and long-lasting product.
In a world dominated by mass production, Pau stands apart. His goal is to respond to cyclists’ real needs, blending creativity, aesthetics, and performance in every frame he builds.
He feels especially connected to the traditional Italian way of understanding bicycles. “Italy is the country of design and aesthetics, but also of technology,” he says. “There’s a joy in how things are made. Others may go further in economic terms, but creativity and the desire to create are deeply rooted there. It’s the same with bicycles.”
Biomechanics
Around 2009, Pau developed his own biomechanical analysis protocol. To do so, he had to study the subject from every possible angle, reading everything available and consulting experienced mechanics. In this context, biomechanics is about adapting a structure to a physical activity: cycling, in this case, so that the human body can perform at its best. That’s where the true connection between cyclist and bicycle begins to take shape.
Once he truly understood how the body moves on a bicycle, his work became simpler. The most important thing, he says, is to be flexible, since no two people are the same. Building a frame requires combining a vast range of theoretical and technical knowledge with real-world experience. For him, it’s only natural to create a custom geometry for each person, rather than forcing everyone to fit the same mold.
He often looks back to the postwar years, when scarcity forced people to create simple, durable objects with a clear purpose. That idea of “less, but better and lasting” is exactly what he wants every Clementina to represent. “Sustainability,” he says, “also means accepting that not everyone has to be obsessed with making money. Not everyone needs to be a big company with huge numbers.”
Mass consumerism
When talking about carbon fiber, Pau is clear about materials. Carbon is closely tied to mass production, it allows frames to be made in large series, at low cost, and without craftsmanship. The industry has adopted it for its supposed performance advantages, although carbon bikes often end up being more expensive simply because the material has become fashionable.
At Clementina, Pau now works exclusively with high-quality DEDACCIAI steel tubing, chosen for its precision, consistency, and ride quality. Steel gives him total control over the bike’s behavior: direct response under load, stability at high speeds, and comfort on long rides, descents, and even climbs. Every frame has custom geometry, designed to meet the cyclist’s needs and perform at peak levels for many years.
Choosing a Clementina means moving away from mass consumerism and choosing something meaningful, a bicycle you want to keep. Pau often recalls how earlier generations spoke of having “a good bike”: one bought once for a lifetime, replacing components when needed but always keeping the same frame.
Every bicycle he builds has a story, and he remembers all of them. Some of his frames have won Catalan championships, and he has also built adapted bicycles for paracycling, including those ridden by former professional cyclist and Olympic medalist Pepi Benítez. Yet Pau believes that for any creator, the best work is always the one yet to come. That’s how he sees his bicycles: as evolving works of art. For him, a bicycle must be emotional and artistic, but also precise, functional, and profoundly technological.
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