City of Joy
by Alvaro Galindo
photo: courtesy of the artist |
Dear Alvaro, First, thank you for this interview. How do you see the role of a painter in today’s world? There is a great variety of manifestations, expressions and artistic movements in today’s world. There are some who denounce, others comment, some are exclusively devoted to transcribe daily life situations. But what is fundamental to an artist, I believe, has not changed with the passing of time since the very beginning of civilization, which is to simply be a story teller, to make evident a life journey, to materialize it with individual expression. |
In my case, I try to blank out my thoughts, to enter a state of “unconsciousness” in order to reach the elementary forms of my brain. It is to stop perceiving and come to what is perceived to be able to materialize the shape in its essence, in its primary moment. This obliges us to think that abstract, as we understand it, is not abstract any more. Those shapes, colors, planes acquire consistency since when they are conjugated they pose situations inscribed in a world, in the universe we live in.
For example, if my state of mind is of euphoria, it is very likely that my understanding of my surroundings will be bright and luminous. That brightness is complex and its transcription is almost impossible: it could come close to blindness, but it is not, because information will always be coded. If my eyes are facing the sun, perhaps they may be in an unbalanced competition, although the sun’s intention is not to harm us. We are not prepared to understand life on a single impact.
Sometimes we think we understand everything, and there is no such a thing. Let us not talk about plastic arts, simply about life, maybe about the every day. If the image comes to us as the sum of all the images, perhaps the chaos is total.
What arguments can I use to make someone understand an idea?
This is an obvious question in the human being context. But what symbols or signs do I use to make them understand me? When I paint, when I draw these questions overwhelm me, these questions drive me crazy. If I’m trying to get to the idea itself; if I’m visualizing the dot concept and not a dot; if I’m analyzing the concept of a line and not the line; if I arm myself with deceitful justifications in the two-dimensional field to understand a tridimensional environment; if I tell people that such an element is heavy in a plane, knowing that the gravitational term doesn’t exist in a piece of paper, then what should I have? Do I want someone to understand it? Or simply, do I want to understand it?
Ok, it’s been said. To think about distance, closeness, up, down, heavy, light, strong, weak, wide, narrow… creates cerebral relations meticulously related to something natural, the fact of being able to take a step and be in a different position, to be able to move a hand and bring it closer to your eyes, without the fingers growing as they get closer, knowing that when the fingers were far away from the eyes they looked smaller. It is natural, we experience it every day, but we do not think about it every day. Without these laws of perception, the world would be a static element, still, perhaps abstract to thinking, probably misunderstood, or understood under other schemes.
There are criteria that we human beings are responsible for confusing. At a time, Henri Matisse received some students in his study in Paris and when one of them saw a drawing on the table he happily exclaimed, “What a beautiful Apple”! And Matisse answered thoughtfully: “That is not an apple, it is the drawing of an apple”! In five minutes Matisse solved the problem of making us understand that in the environment we live in there are serious possibilities of transgressing the space, and in a plane simply to suggest it.
What we need to understand is that thinking, the capacity of analysis, the relationships, all make imagination surpass any state, if it is based simply on a two-dimensional plane.
What do you make of the impact of technology in the visual arts?
Depending on how you see it. For example, if we take technology as a communication element, I think it’s wonderful. The artist’s work is now more likely to be seen even in corners of the world where simply accessing a book from a museum was physically impossible.
Also, for an artist to be able to show work not only to very few people in a gallery or studio setting, but to share it with hundreds and thousands of people around the world is an achievement of technology.
Now, if we endorse the technical aspect, we also find new ways of expression. Under audiovisual, pixels painting is a fact, and it is something with very good representatives. Virtual reality, I am sure, will give us something to talk about when it comes to additional artistic offerings and tools in software, hardware and periphery systems. 3D printing, makes it possible to create a sculptural element, transmit it via network and even print it on the other side of the world. It is simply extraordinary.
These view points and perceptions have created new ideas, which have served the artist to have a different kind of awareness about the world. To be able to see the planet, the universe from outside, in real time, through a “DRONE”, makes us have another perspective of what we see, what we feel. It is without a doubt good justification to consider all of this in a work of art.
Each time period comes with new arguments and possibilities. I am sure that when Jan Van Eyck invented oil painting, he raised new expressive possibilities in art.
For example, if my state of mind is of euphoria, it is very likely that my understanding of my surroundings will be bright and luminous. That brightness is complex and its transcription is almost impossible: it could come close to blindness, but it is not, because information will always be coded. If my eyes are facing the sun, perhaps they may be in an unbalanced competition, although the sun’s intention is not to harm us. We are not prepared to understand life on a single impact.
Sometimes we think we understand everything, and there is no such a thing. Let us not talk about plastic arts, simply about life, maybe about the every day. If the image comes to us as the sum of all the images, perhaps the chaos is total.
What arguments can I use to make someone understand an idea?
This is an obvious question in the human being context. But what symbols or signs do I use to make them understand me? When I paint, when I draw these questions overwhelm me, these questions drive me crazy. If I’m trying to get to the idea itself; if I’m visualizing the dot concept and not a dot; if I’m analyzing the concept of a line and not the line; if I arm myself with deceitful justifications in the two-dimensional field to understand a tridimensional environment; if I tell people that such an element is heavy in a plane, knowing that the gravitational term doesn’t exist in a piece of paper, then what should I have? Do I want someone to understand it? Or simply, do I want to understand it?
Ok, it’s been said. To think about distance, closeness, up, down, heavy, light, strong, weak, wide, narrow… creates cerebral relations meticulously related to something natural, the fact of being able to take a step and be in a different position, to be able to move a hand and bring it closer to your eyes, without the fingers growing as they get closer, knowing that when the fingers were far away from the eyes they looked smaller. It is natural, we experience it every day, but we do not think about it every day. Without these laws of perception, the world would be a static element, still, perhaps abstract to thinking, probably misunderstood, or understood under other schemes.
There are criteria that we human beings are responsible for confusing. At a time, Henri Matisse received some students in his study in Paris and when one of them saw a drawing on the table he happily exclaimed, “What a beautiful Apple”! And Matisse answered thoughtfully: “That is not an apple, it is the drawing of an apple”! In five minutes Matisse solved the problem of making us understand that in the environment we live in there are serious possibilities of transgressing the space, and in a plane simply to suggest it.
What we need to understand is that thinking, the capacity of analysis, the relationships, all make imagination surpass any state, if it is based simply on a two-dimensional plane.
What do you make of the impact of technology in the visual arts?
Depending on how you see it. For example, if we take technology as a communication element, I think it’s wonderful. The artist’s work is now more likely to be seen even in corners of the world where simply accessing a book from a museum was physically impossible.
Also, for an artist to be able to show work not only to very few people in a gallery or studio setting, but to share it with hundreds and thousands of people around the world is an achievement of technology.
Now, if we endorse the technical aspect, we also find new ways of expression. Under audiovisual, pixels painting is a fact, and it is something with very good representatives. Virtual reality, I am sure, will give us something to talk about when it comes to additional artistic offerings and tools in software, hardware and periphery systems. 3D printing, makes it possible to create a sculptural element, transmit it via network and even print it on the other side of the world. It is simply extraordinary.
These view points and perceptions have created new ideas, which have served the artist to have a different kind of awareness about the world. To be able to see the planet, the universe from outside, in real time, through a “DRONE”, makes us have another perspective of what we see, what we feel. It is without a doubt good justification to consider all of this in a work of art.
Each time period comes with new arguments and possibilities. I am sure that when Jan Van Eyck invented oil painting, he raised new expressive possibilities in art.
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What are your favorite mediums and why?
I am kind of traditional when it comes to technique. I like, for example to start with pigment as a fundamental element in the manufacturing of any type of paint. Although I start from the basis of art as an experiment.
Now, with the speed of the world I believe that one of my favorite techniques is acrylic because as an expressive medium it is very close to oil but of fast treatment and manipulation, not as slow as its older brother the oil.
I also believe in techniques and mediums like drawing, I continue to believe that it is not only an important structural element in painting, but an extraordinary expressive element, unique, without limits. I don’t want to live aside the printed media, engraving, serigraph, silk screen, are elements present in my work.
Who are the artists who have had an influence on your work?
Many, I would fall short in naming them all. If I had to summarize them I would start with Bosco, then Kandinsky, his interest in musical techniques and fusion, the harmonic short stories in his work, the color vibration I believe are fascinating worlds.
Impressionist and post-impressionists, Monet, Degas, Gauguin, Van Gogh himself, Paul Klee, as expressionist representative, and also inscribed in the abstract field I think is simply amazing. Marc Chagall, as representative of fauvism, Edvard Munch, his first expressive years are of impeccable treatment, but his expressiveness in his soul’s dissection, as he himself referred to, are remarkable. Antoni Tapies, as the exponent of informalism, the use of technique, experimentation with new materials, are subjects that call my attention immensely about this Catalan painter. Miró, Picasso, well, all. Jasper Johns, Duchamp, Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock, I would not end writing about each one named and thousands more I did not mention but are present in my life.
Undoubtedly, we are full of memories, life experiences, codified files that we try to express with our own arguments, with our own history, with our own discourse.
When do you concentrate on promoting your art work just before an exhibition or is it part of an artist’s workflow despite exhibition schedules?
The work must be justified on its own. The time spent in the promotion is incidental. The energy must be concentrated in the execution of the work, in the proposal itself, in being able to transmit the fundamental, the very essence of the artist embodied in an element, in something that might seem inert but because its expressive force is able to communicate and transgress a space, that reaches the mind of the spectator and does something like a feeling, like something uncomfortable, like something pleasant, or static, or, something.
Having said this I do not mean that I have to stop doing so, in fact it must be done, but I believe that it is implicit in the discourse itself, in the approach of the work.
Where did you look for inspiration for a work like El árbol de las delicias?
First of all, I could say that Bosco’s work, El árbol de las delicias, not only because of the title, but because of how visual elements are managed. More than that, it is an interpretation and a criticism to modernity, to the industrial era, to mass production.
Why did I call it as such? Because of the word tree essence, for the growing element, for the fruit element, because all this production that we believe is good in our time, it is not necessarily so. This does not mean that every person who observes it will find his/her own interpretation and life experience.
These are simply some of many initial arguments of the work.
What has been the most impressive list of events throughout your artistic career?
Having been involved with mural paint restoration, having been a professor at the University, having been a researcher for many years about topics related to perception, have marked my artistic life.
Events, exhibitions, biennials, art fairs, let us say they are secondary elements that we artists add to our daily lives. But I don’t consider them fundamental in an artistic career. In these types of events, a series of elements alien to art take precedence without adding anything important to the plastic argument.
Of course, I do like to look at the world as a structural object, where there are lines, vectors, organic rooms, to submerge myself into that vast disposition and understand that I am part of it. Those lines intercede us, go through us, they go towards other beings, towards other objects and return, they carry part of me and return with part of others.
That interrelation must be in the planet for it to exist or not, a balance, a composition, a synergy, something that tells us, that guides us, that gives us signals and tells us what is the reason, the cause of loving, hating, painting or simply live.
What is the best compliment you’ve received about your work?
The best recognition an artist can have is without doubt something abstract in a day-to-day context; to contemplate the work with attentive observation, with interest and care and in an intimate way.
That to me is the greatest recognition.
Without doubt I have been told interesting things, but when I transcribe and translate it into an understandable language, contemplation loses incidence and force.
The answer is somewhat philosophical, but I believe it is as such.
Why should the world turn to art and to your art in particular?
The world should turn to art, yes, in fact yes, not necessarily to mine; I do not want to be pretentious. But if we turn to art, the world would immediately be a better place. E.H. Gombrich, Erwin Panofsky and many other thinkers and analysts state it in studies about incidence of art on human being. But let us not focus the answer on theoretical terms.
Simply, art’s power, in all its manifestations is overwhelming, to a point where it can change lives, change the way of thinking, if we enroll ourselves in understanding art as art, surely nothing will happen, but if art shelters our lives, we will understand many things of the universe itself, we will understand the reason for living.
What makes your heart jump from joy nowadays?
Paint, paint, paint!!! To live in the City of Joy, to be in a modern society, to be able to decipher the unreality codex to have an interior journey and live in parallel worlds to continue creating. That fills me.
I am kind of traditional when it comes to technique. I like, for example to start with pigment as a fundamental element in the manufacturing of any type of paint. Although I start from the basis of art as an experiment.
Now, with the speed of the world I believe that one of my favorite techniques is acrylic because as an expressive medium it is very close to oil but of fast treatment and manipulation, not as slow as its older brother the oil.
I also believe in techniques and mediums like drawing, I continue to believe that it is not only an important structural element in painting, but an extraordinary expressive element, unique, without limits. I don’t want to live aside the printed media, engraving, serigraph, silk screen, are elements present in my work.
Who are the artists who have had an influence on your work?
Many, I would fall short in naming them all. If I had to summarize them I would start with Bosco, then Kandinsky, his interest in musical techniques and fusion, the harmonic short stories in his work, the color vibration I believe are fascinating worlds.
Impressionist and post-impressionists, Monet, Degas, Gauguin, Van Gogh himself, Paul Klee, as expressionist representative, and also inscribed in the abstract field I think is simply amazing. Marc Chagall, as representative of fauvism, Edvard Munch, his first expressive years are of impeccable treatment, but his expressiveness in his soul’s dissection, as he himself referred to, are remarkable. Antoni Tapies, as the exponent of informalism, the use of technique, experimentation with new materials, are subjects that call my attention immensely about this Catalan painter. Miró, Picasso, well, all. Jasper Johns, Duchamp, Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock, I would not end writing about each one named and thousands more I did not mention but are present in my life.
Undoubtedly, we are full of memories, life experiences, codified files that we try to express with our own arguments, with our own history, with our own discourse.
When do you concentrate on promoting your art work just before an exhibition or is it part of an artist’s workflow despite exhibition schedules?
The work must be justified on its own. The time spent in the promotion is incidental. The energy must be concentrated in the execution of the work, in the proposal itself, in being able to transmit the fundamental, the very essence of the artist embodied in an element, in something that might seem inert but because its expressive force is able to communicate and transgress a space, that reaches the mind of the spectator and does something like a feeling, like something uncomfortable, like something pleasant, or static, or, something.
Having said this I do not mean that I have to stop doing so, in fact it must be done, but I believe that it is implicit in the discourse itself, in the approach of the work.
Where did you look for inspiration for a work like El árbol de las delicias?
First of all, I could say that Bosco’s work, El árbol de las delicias, not only because of the title, but because of how visual elements are managed. More than that, it is an interpretation and a criticism to modernity, to the industrial era, to mass production.
Why did I call it as such? Because of the word tree essence, for the growing element, for the fruit element, because all this production that we believe is good in our time, it is not necessarily so. This does not mean that every person who observes it will find his/her own interpretation and life experience.
These are simply some of many initial arguments of the work.
What has been the most impressive list of events throughout your artistic career?
Having been involved with mural paint restoration, having been a professor at the University, having been a researcher for many years about topics related to perception, have marked my artistic life.
Events, exhibitions, biennials, art fairs, let us say they are secondary elements that we artists add to our daily lives. But I don’t consider them fundamental in an artistic career. In these types of events, a series of elements alien to art take precedence without adding anything important to the plastic argument.
Of course, I do like to look at the world as a structural object, where there are lines, vectors, organic rooms, to submerge myself into that vast disposition and understand that I am part of it. Those lines intercede us, go through us, they go towards other beings, towards other objects and return, they carry part of me and return with part of others.
That interrelation must be in the planet for it to exist or not, a balance, a composition, a synergy, something that tells us, that guides us, that gives us signals and tells us what is the reason, the cause of loving, hating, painting or simply live.
What is the best compliment you’ve received about your work?
The best recognition an artist can have is without doubt something abstract in a day-to-day context; to contemplate the work with attentive observation, with interest and care and in an intimate way.
That to me is the greatest recognition.
Without doubt I have been told interesting things, but when I transcribe and translate it into an understandable language, contemplation loses incidence and force.
The answer is somewhat philosophical, but I believe it is as such.
Why should the world turn to art and to your art in particular?
The world should turn to art, yes, in fact yes, not necessarily to mine; I do not want to be pretentious. But if we turn to art, the world would immediately be a better place. E.H. Gombrich, Erwin Panofsky and many other thinkers and analysts state it in studies about incidence of art on human being. But let us not focus the answer on theoretical terms.
Simply, art’s power, in all its manifestations is overwhelming, to a point where it can change lives, change the way of thinking, if we enroll ourselves in understanding art as art, surely nothing will happen, but if art shelters our lives, we will understand many things of the universe itself, we will understand the reason for living.
What makes your heart jump from joy nowadays?
Paint, paint, paint!!! To live in the City of Joy, to be in a modern society, to be able to decipher the unreality codex to have an interior journey and live in parallel worlds to continue creating. That fills me.