Project:
- to exchange experiences with some teachers of Studio Art
- to write an article on Art and Education (this one)
- to paint. To exhibit undertaken work next season at Galería Alegria (Madrid, Spain) and Carreras-Múgica (Bilbao, Spain)
Daily schedule:
- Monday, Wednesday and Friday: walk from approximately 7:15 to 9:00; after that, paint until 14:00.
- Tuesday and Thursday, walk to Studio Art; work at the Library from 9:00 to 14:00 pm
- Sometimes go to talks and exhibitions
I am a painter and an Art professor at the University. Due to this double dedication, I continually have to talk about art and monitor my own way of working. Although I recognize the impossibility, I have to observe it from a distance, as if it were not mine; it also forces me to draw, from that experience, technical or methodological conclusions to be communicated. Painting and speaking, ensuring that the latter respects the essential dumbness of the former.
So, I think that within my work, painting appears in conflict with itself as an authority. By authority, I mean not only tradition, but also an ideal of seriousness, skill, professionalism, formal and colouristic maturity (a kind of superego represented by open forms and toned colours, something like Rembrandt´s painting) that my pictures sometimes seem to aspire to and at other times appear to abhor.
In opposition to this, I see the love for outlining and colouring; colour as a filler, and line as a radical separation. This conflict is materialized as a permanent escape: from the clean line which insulates, to the line which floats in dirty atmospheres and vice versa; from positioned colour to colour that floods everything and vice versa. Sometimes, the flight exceeds the limits of the frame and flatness, and colour becomes an object or film. I want to believe that if the flight ever reaches its goal, it does so through unsentimental tone chords which neither illustrate nor express. I think it is the sound of the new, which as such, occurs differently each time. I admire the dark of Caravaggio or Rembrandt´s ease, but even more so, I admire Giotto´s joy and Bellini´s cleaning.
This, which would appear to be an intra-pictorial issue, is analogous to a much more general matter: the conflict between the individual and the collective; between the subject and what holds her or him.
And how should I talk about it? I find no other solution than trying to empty the word through excess. To say everything and do this in many different ways, so that meaning appears across the cracks of a discourse and painterly work which is impossible to organize. To seek an entirely empty form of the word which also paints.
