“Painting is very much about tact, even though nowadays we deal with painting mainly through screens. I like to think these little paintings are more tactile than the larger ones.”

Interview by: Natalia Gonzalez Martin

Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? Where did you study? 

I studied in Cuenca, a Castilian town in the middle of nowhere. By the time it was a very advanced university, but it was strange because it didn’t have any context that had to do with the arts, so it was a weird experience: a bunch of young people living by their own in a place nobody cared about what they where doing. I guess I’ve kept the feeling that being dedicated to the arts is similar to being nowhere. My best friends are still those I made there.  

I had a very theoretical formation, but when I finished, and I had began my carrier as an artist and was already showing, I decided to paint, that was something I didn’t know how to do at all, so, as a painter, I consider myself self told. In those years I had to combine learning something that was totally new to me as a practice, with trying to make a living as an artist. Painting was a decision I made a certain day, and I have kept it, but one thing is deciding it and another thing is to paint. It’s been a hard journey to get to understand the difference between an image and a painting. But there was something I was very determined about, and that was not to separate thinking from making. So from that moment on, most of my concerns were about the method. Now painting is a habit.

Tell us a bit about how you spend your day/studio routine? What is your studio like?

We have just moved to a little village in Mallorca called Bunyola and my studio is what it used to be the butcher’s, and still looks like it. It’s in the middle of town in a pretty busy street (the busy this gets…). It has a couple big windows so everybody can see me working when they pass trough, and I watch everyone coming and going. Sometimes I feel like a monkey in its cage, but it’s fine. It isn’t a big space, not at all, but lately I’ve found I work better in a small place, I concentrate better. I know it seems I say this because I paint very small paintings, but that is just one of the three or four lines of work I have. I’m jumping from one to the other every half a year more or less.

What I find very important about any studio is to have a good place to storage and keep the working space as clear as possible.

I usually get there very early in the morning; those are the hours I prefer for painting. I listen to the news in the radio and these last years I’ve been listening to Vivaldi a lot, because Bach drives me crazy, and some punk, garage and metal too. On Sundays I love listening to soccer broadcasting while painting. Days roll by very easily. I spend lots of time with the family, go walking in the mountains and do not much…I love drinking wine at lunch and having a siesta. I’m surprised things can be easy; it was never like this in my live before.

Your work is so tiny that you have to look twice to realize there is a piece in the middle of a large white wall. When I encountered those at Union Gallery, I found a similar gratification as when I would find Waldo in a book. The fact that we are not used to this feeling makes me think of the lack of patience we have nowadays. Your work demands us to come intimately close to it, how does this affect the relationship between the piece and the viewer?

You’re right, when you see these little paintings it’s much more difficult to separate the image from the painting matter. Usually, when you enter a painting show, what you first get are images, and then, if you get closer, you can see what they are made of. Here you have to get close and that’s why you can’t avoid perceiving the painting matter that, proportionally, is much thicker than in a common painting. I find a very natural impulse the one that makes you want to touch a painting. It’s like if you had the feeling that, by touching it, you would have another kind of information, the one that could tell you about that strange relationship matter and representation have. Representation it’s a weird thing, but we’re so used to deal with it that we don’t realize it. Usually representation it’s a way to tell something, but if you stop on it, and here I appreciate you mentioned patience, there’s always a tension that is one of the main themes of all time painting. In that sense these works could be called pocket paintings, not only because of the size, but because it’s something you could have at hand, take it out of your wallet and touch it.

When Thomas found Jesus resurrected he had to touch him to believe what he was seeing; he needed to touch him, his view wasn’t enough proof. And it’s not by chance this passage of the bible has been painted so many times. But, on the other side, there’s another passage, that has probably been painted even more, that is the noli me tangere (don’t you dare touching me): when Maria Magdalena realizes that the one in front of her is god’s son, her immediate reaction is to try to touch him, but Jesus gets away avoiding the contact. As the transcendental figure he is he doesn’t want to be touched. In these two bible passages we find the touch vs don’t touch painting dilema. Tact is probably a more animal sensation than view. Painting is very much about tact, even though nowadays we deal with painting mainly through screens. I like to think these little paintings are more tactile than the larger ones.

All exhibitions are digitally recorded, and I have seen your work online, do you think the immediacy of this medium has any impact on the work? 

One good thing about these pieces being so small is that they’re not easily reduced when reproduced on a screen, and that is just the opposite it usually happens. So when you see them on a screen you are getting even closer to them.

A year ago the curator Dieuwertje Hehewerth wrote about them as if they were like digital icons, referred to a larger body. I never thought about them this way before, but I think she made a point: they refer to larger paintings and, like a digital icon, it would be by pressing them (touching, again) how they would get you to another place, they would open a door. So I guess they do have a certain relationship with the digital world, I don’t know…

The images represented borrow inspiration from different works of art as well as everyday objects such as a loaf of bread, how do you select the subjects represented?

This is the kind of painting a retired person would do. Something you can do comfortably seated, copying whatever you like. So that’s about it: I copy what I like. At the same time, let’s be honest, I copy what I know it’s not going to be very difficult. Because if there’s a difference between miniature painting and my little pieces is that these ones are not about virtuosity. Mine are easy to paint, at least to me! And besides I love copying, it’s a very intimate way of relating with the masters. And then I like to place my own (large) paintings copied as well, next to my favorites of the art history. It’s the way I find to place myself among the greatest ones. I also copy paintings from unknown painters I can find in flea markets or elsewhere, and I copy family pictures too: my son, my daughter dressed for Halloween… I even copy some contemporary paintings as well. In Union’s show there was a copy of a painting by Xinyi Chen that I really liked when I saw it in Frieze this past year.

If there’s a difference to me between painting in a regular scale and painting this small is the lack of struggle. I’ve always envy Alx Katz’s easiness and the way he conciliates family life with painting. And, at the same time, he’s pieces have moved me so much. So through him I realized that non-romantic figurative good painting is possible, but, as a painter, until these little pieces I didn’t get close to that feeling.

Your last exhibition at Union Gallery referenced the work of the poet José Watanabe. What drew you to his work and how does it interweave with your practice?

I drop into poetry from time to time, though I don’t last much, I can’t keep my attention for a long period of time. For me is a very demanding activity. This time I began reading poetry again because I thought it could help me placing objects on a still life. Eugenio Montale, Lope de Vega, Philip Larkin, César Vallejo, Szymborska, Zbigbew Herbert, Sandro Penna, Claudio Rodríguez, were the ones I went through this time, but when I got to Watanabe it really hit me. He was talking about my life in a way I wasn’t brave enough to do it myself. Choosing that verse as the title for the show was just a little tribute.

From a wider point of view I’m interested in poetry as a field in the arts that is not as ruled by the market as visual art is. As a poem is not an object is not as easy for it to carry money the way a painting does.

Now that we are isolated at home and don’t know how things are going to be like when this period ends, I guess we can’t help thinking maybe the world of art won’t be there anymore when we come back. And that’s because we will consider normal the world of art to desappear because we all know is absurd. That wouldn’t happen with poetry, not even with painting itself.

One of the things I like about painting is that it can share the contemporary spaces and institutions of art, but at the same time it doesn’t need them to exist. It has one foot in and one foot out; I like that duality. In that sense figurative painting has the advantage to relate with people with less mediation than other mediums, and I really appreciate that. If we think about it, figurative painting is much older than art itself and will remain if this huge institution we call art happens to disappear. So, if the corona doesn’t go away soon, and our economy collapses, I imagine myself selling my little paintings on the street but, what will Hito Steyerl do? Well, I’m sure she’d manage…

Another thing I like about poetry is that it isn’t easy to translate, and that way it remains attached to a certain culture through its language. Poetry isn’t that much globalizable, and it always refers to a specific identity and a specific tradition. That doesn’t mean that you can not read Lope de Vega (what I truly recommend to everyone) if you don’t know any Spanish, but, if you get to like his poetry enough, you’ll probably end up trying to learn some Spanish. I don’t know Italian, but when I’m reading Montale I have a bilingual edition and I read both versions, with one I get the meaning and with the other the rhythm. This kind of approach doesn’t happen much with painting nowadays, because it’s so alike everywhere. Not to talk about the artfairs, that is very much like the ATP tennis circuit, where the cities these events take place at are little more than a background set.

 What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?

This October my wife and I made a two-day trip to Milan just to see the De Pisis show at the Museo del Novecento. I love the Italian painting of first half of the XX century, but among all these great artists: Carrá, di Savinio, Scipione, Mafai, Balla, de Chirico, Morandi… the one I like the most is De Pisis. He is an astonishing still life painter. I copy him without mercy. I enjoy the way he paints so much. But I found the show a little disappointing. As he is not a main historical figure, the treatment of the paintings (the lighting, the spaces between the pieces, the architecture of the exhibition space, even the color of the walls…) was as secondary as the conception they probably have of the artist himself. They didn’t treat the pieces with care, you could tell that. Apart from that, it annoyed me that they put the focus so much on his homosexuality. For instance: the big images hanging in the wall outside where three portraits, and portraits, anyone can tell, are not his best production. The cover of the catalogue was a portrait of a young sailor very much in the fashion of Fassbinder’s Querelle. I’m sure it’s true they didn’t give him the first prize of the Biennale when he was alive because he was gay, but recovering him because he was, is very unfair, it misses the main point: he is an amazing painter. It’s sad, but he has been thematized.

That makes me think about the themes artists choose for their works. How sincere are we when we choose one? Or, to put it another way, would we, as artists, copy any discourse that would get attention or money for us? How can we know we’re not regime’s artists? I think themes are always nothing but alibis, that’s why I like still lifes so much.

How do you go about naming your work?

Not too well, I’m afraid… I usually don’t think about it until the pieces are done, and then I look around to see what I find that could match them. I often borrow from what I’m reading at the time, as I did for Union. Once I was reading Marx and painting sheep, so the show title was A sheep is haunting Europe.

Is there anything else in the pipeline?

Well, it’s strange how simple life seems now the corona has made us stop. Weren’t machines made so we wouldn’t have to work anymore?

jorgediezma.com

All images are courtesy of the artist
Date of publication: 29/04/20