How did your career as a visual artist begin?
Being a painter is something I have always wanted to achieve, but from a young age I received some courses and guided my studies until I got to Bellas Artes. There I was able to be more in touch with companions with the same concerns, assimilate notions of drawing, painting and sculpture and try to understand the world of art in its complexity. After graduating from the University of Seville, I studied the Master's degree in Art: Idea and Production at the same faculty, where I found a line of work that motivated me to move forward in a more concrete and personal direction. For me, it was the key to 2017, when I started sharing studios with other artists with much more consolidated backgrounds than mine like Matías Sánchez, Cristina Lama or Miguel Gómez Losada and I was able to learn a lot from them through their work dynamics and listening to their advice. This same year I was sent to the University of Seville to carry out more Doctorate studies and teach classes in the Department of Painting, and to combine pictorial research with theory, which both fed back into me and my career as a visual artist developed little by little. maturing together with the commitment to find my voice in painting. Constantly and participating in various events, contests, exhibitions or convocations, I have been able to start a project with others and I currently dedicate a large part of my time to working in the studio. I still feel like I'm at the beginning, because it's a very long and intense career, but I could only equate these years to something like an exciting expedition to the unknown, where the process is improvised and each discovery opens the way to a result so unexpected and magical as is the painting itself.
How would you describe your artistic approach?
I believe that, in short, both in my work and when approaching others, I try to create artifice and completeness so that I can give myself the essence of the emotions that an image and its fact can transmit. This does not mean that I do not try to assume and channel this complexity to express it in my painting, but I seek to do it through apparently simple elements that, through their own pictorial resources, can generate in the viewer the experience of being transported to environments both simple and extraño familiar. I believe that this is precisely what makes me find in the landscape the appropriate subject for my work and the point at which many aspects related to perception converge in those that I am interested in deepening.
Since I understand art as a portal to alternative spaces, I approach it from the five senses as far as possible because I believe in the importance of each one of them for the (partial) understanding of the circumstances that surround any form of artistic creation.
"Zafiro", Oil on linen
100 x 81 cm
2023
Artist photography by Lluc Queralt
How does your creative process work?
I tend to have to tell more about what happens in the studio to find the beginning or end of a project or creative process. I generally have ideas around a theme hanging around in my head for some time until they manifest or materialize in some way. Unconsciously, I am receptive every twenty hours of the day to everything that calls for my attention (situations, experiences, sensations, surroundings, stimuli, readings, referents…). All these influences remain archived in my imagination, with which I make up my own images and definitively form my particular view of the world, of the physical or of what painting proposes. I could also decide that a large part of my work is based on making detours, both physical and virtual, in which I find elements that interest me later, perhaps automatically after a period of time, looking at them again and integrating them into my painting by decontextualizing them. from the space where it comes from, including playing to compose other new ones.
At the moment of starting the framework, all these references from previous work come together, even though it is difficult to rely on references and images, I give way to improvisation so that its own plastic language can be found and it can find these spaces of evocation where the landscapes that I propose.
"Powerscourt Waterfall after Jacqueline Stanley"
Oil on linen
150 x 100 cm
2023
Artist photography by Lluc Queralt
What do you try to express in your works?
I seek to transfer in some way to the surface the subjects that worry me, that attract me, that I consider can decide something important if I speak from painting, which configures an aesthetic with which I want to present my perception of our surroundings. Each element takes on a different dimension if a subjective view filters it and presents it as new converted into a piece of creation, and in my case I claim the painting as resistance to this accelerated and virtual present, and the landscape as a scene in which to build new atmospheres channeling the subjective interpretation about questions that are both overwhelming (how attraction can be the sublime emotion, that which overcomes us), as well as everyday and more banal. The space that we inhabit, that we imagine or build can be seen in infinite ways and, from my sensitive approach, I can only provide critical and emotional, rational and irrational, real and evocative views… that identify with me and arrive in this case (the in) provoke in the spectator the journey to his own imaginaries generating the notion of landscape through a simple language.
How do you face creative challenges in your work?
With a lot of vertigo and illusion in equal parts. The ambitious proposals that pose a challenge and an important step in the career always provoke certain respect (the fear) that I try to mitigate by being prudent and trying to bet and involve myself as much as possible in the question I am addressing. I believe that the most important thing is not to lose the objective and to be sincere with the same always, that the project starts from certain bonds and personal motivation with the theme that gives coherence to all aspects related to it and that marks a creative stage and a point starting point for subsequent work.
In my daily work I also try to set myself straight and, with all the positive and negative things that can be assumed, I like being self-demanding because it scares me to stagnate. I'm sure I'm thinking a lot about painting to make certain decisions that arise in practice and to debug it from where I want, but if I'm stuck in some box or have doubts about where to take it from, I can't begin to start something new with something new to look at. so much conscious reflection to free myself and let me take it only through liberation to the place that, precisely, this state of blockage has driven me. In the process you can find a lot of keys, and if they sell badly… Is that so important?
Which artists inspire you?
There are many, and they are changing according to stages, but I would highlight from classics that have always been more relevant such as Corot, Friedrich, Rosseau or Engelmüller to contemporary artists such as Mamma Andersson, Tacita Dean, Vija Celmins, Hurvin Anderson, Adrian Ghenie, Santiago Giralda or Lucas Rue.
"Amatista"
Oil on linen
150 x 100 cm
2021
Artist photography by Lluc QueraltDo you have a project or recent work that you would like to share?
Leading up to the next solo exhibition, I am investigating the relationship between the human being and nature since ancient times, looking for an approximation between painting and the most ancient elements that relate to the environment. From the definitions of theorists such as the philosopher Remo Bodei or the geographer Yi-Fu Tan of the natural spaces that constitute the category of romance (forest, waterfall, mountain, glacier, volcano...) I am generating a visual atlas that of someone way connect our spiritual belonging with the ground with the interpretations and rituals that have been carried out in it since before the appearance of the concepts that today define and contain its margins and the elements that it contains. The images I am producing seek to explore the enigmatic, planting imprecise, hidden and delocalized spaces.
Do you have any advice that you would like to share with young people who are taking their first steps into the world of art?
It's not an easy world. I would recommend a lot of consistency, patience and work. Accepting that this is a personal search path and accepting that many times success is relative and arriving sooner or later is also a question of success. I have learned that it is important to work without pretensions for others, that the battle is the same and that it always brings positive results, no matter when.
Finally, which artist does he work with any day?
It is often impossible to decide one, but probably Tacita Dean. I believe we have a similar imagination and its parts always motivate me to continue linked to the landscape in my work.
"Tourmaline"
Oil on linen
162 x 130 cm
2022
Artist photography by Lluc Queralt