The painter must have love for what he is doing. If he is good at his craft, his love for his art will be communicated. And there will be people who will receive his message and will feel his love of the craft of painting. For me, those are important values that the spectator should receive. When the spectator contemplates a painting, the spectator receives that message of the artist’s love of his craft.
In Spanish the word for craft is oficio, and it means craft, skill, talent, dedication to the art. Craft, especially now, is very important. A painter expresses not simply a message in the painting’s content but also his oficio. And for me it’s very important to appreciate and value the painter’s skill: his know-how, his ability to paint.
I want a rebirth of oficio, of craft, a rebirth of skill and know-how, a rebirth of the traditional artistic values that the great artists have bequeathed to us. We are forgetting them. We are wasting them. And we should not. The appreciation of those values is what I want to transmit pictorially in my painting.
I have often repeated the phrase: “Time does not pardon what has been made without it.” The message of love of knowing how to make things can bring a rebirth of values in those who capture the message. And not just in painting. In anything: writing, playing music, or simply being a plumber. Whatever is done with one’s hands and affects society has to reflect that love of doing things well.
Although my images have evolved from the early work until now, they reflect an inheritance of the art most representative of Catalonia: Romanesque art, and later Gothic art. The images also come from Mediterranean civilization–from the Byzantine, the Hellenic. It is an aesthetic inheritance, a cultural inheritance, from all that constitutes the Mediterranean culture, and most specifically the Catalan culture.
The faces, the figures, remind us of Catalan Romanesque art. But I think that in the work I am doing now the figures are to some extent fleeing from the Romanesque influence. Unintentionally, I am coming out from under that Romanesque influence and going toward a fuller figuration. It’s like crossing a border. At this time in my life, for me, the art of the Renaissance is the art most sublime in the history of painting. Now my figures are looking more like those of the Italian Renaissance, and less like those of the Catalan Romanesque period.
Normally, when I am creating a figure, I don’t think about whether it is feminine or masculine. It is a human being. Because all that envelops us–joys, gifts, impressions, sensations–are the same for a woman as for a man. There is no difference. Therefore, I create one character, or figure. Obviously, in some compositions a figure is clearly feminine, a body is feminine. Why do I sometimes create an obviously feminine figure? Because for me the world is full of beauty–the flowers, the countryside, the sky, the stars, the moon. And woman forms part of that beauty. Sometimes when I’m depicting all this beauty, a woman’s body emerges–as part of the beauty. There is also a symbolic dimension in that woman–in principle–is life. Life comes out of the woman’s womb. And so from time to time I paint a woman as symbol of life itself.
I say that painting is an act of love. It is a gesture of love.
Translated by Betty Jean Craige
In Spanish the word for craft is oficio, and it means craft, skill, talent, dedication to the art. Craft, especially now, is very important. A painter expresses not simply a message in the painting’s content but also his oficio. And for me it’s very important to appreciate and value the painter’s skill: his know-how, his ability to paint.
I want a rebirth of oficio, of craft, a rebirth of skill and know-how, a rebirth of the traditional artistic values that the great artists have bequeathed to us. We are forgetting them. We are wasting them. And we should not. The appreciation of those values is what I want to transmit pictorially in my painting.
I have often repeated the phrase: “Time does not pardon what has been made without it.” The message of love of knowing how to make things can bring a rebirth of values in those who capture the message. And not just in painting. In anything: writing, playing music, or simply being a plumber. Whatever is done with one’s hands and affects society has to reflect that love of doing things well.
Although my images have evolved from the early work until now, they reflect an inheritance of the art most representative of Catalonia: Romanesque art, and later Gothic art. The images also come from Mediterranean civilization–from the Byzantine, the Hellenic. It is an aesthetic inheritance, a cultural inheritance, from all that constitutes the Mediterranean culture, and most specifically the Catalan culture.
The faces, the figures, remind us of Catalan Romanesque art. But I think that in the work I am doing now the figures are to some extent fleeing from the Romanesque influence. Unintentionally, I am coming out from under that Romanesque influence and going toward a fuller figuration. It’s like crossing a border. At this time in my life, for me, the art of the Renaissance is the art most sublime in the history of painting. Now my figures are looking more like those of the Italian Renaissance, and less like those of the Catalan Romanesque period.
Normally, when I am creating a figure, I don’t think about whether it is feminine or masculine. It is a human being. Because all that envelops us–joys, gifts, impressions, sensations–are the same for a woman as for a man. There is no difference. Therefore, I create one character, or figure. Obviously, in some compositions a figure is clearly feminine, a body is feminine. Why do I sometimes create an obviously feminine figure? Because for me the world is full of beauty–the flowers, the countryside, the sky, the stars, the moon. And woman forms part of that beauty. Sometimes when I’m depicting all this beauty, a woman’s body emerges–as part of the beauty. There is also a symbolic dimension in that woman–in principle–is life. Life comes out of the woman’s womb. And so from time to time I paint a woman as symbol of life itself.
I say that painting is an act of love. It is a gesture of love.
Translated by Betty Jean Craige
