2 - SEPTEMBER - 2003

An obvious, inevitable question…Why after twenty years as an artist have you never held a single exhibition? The reason can obviously have nothing to do with any technical difficulty since even a little old lady who paints for therapy gets a travelling exhibition in community centres or cultural associations supported by the relevant government body.
If nowadays you can get an exhibition by kicking a can of paint over, Why this lack of interest in something that can add so much to a curriculum ?

You ask me the question as if it were a shortcoming in a professional artist and I really consider it as one more option. One, two, a hundred exhibitions don’t make you a better painter, don’t give you more expertise or artistic knowledge; it puts you in a good negotiating position and this opinion is one of the great errors of our century and has contributed to the rise of a multitudinous group of frauds and exhibitionists in painting. Why does it seem that today any painter becomes ‘professional’ after holding an exhibition ? It seems difficult to understand given that it isn’t really difficult to get exhibitions.
Artistically speaking, work is what brings validity, not how the work is publicised or sold.; we should distinguish a good painter from a good propagandist; exceptionally both qualities come together in the same person.

Artists can’t be judged by the number of exhibitions they have held because it would be like judging a book by how many pages it has and it would multiply absurdities which wouldn’t make the new currents of theoretical opinion any more credible. Imagine the work of a new author with a lot of purchasing power holding his or her first exhibition in a gallery. The positive reviews would be appropriate in their praise, based on a promising career. After the same exhibition has been moving around European capitals for two years and returned to its starting point, the work, which is the same, would have been re-evaluated from every aspect: theoretical, artistic and economic.

If I invest my money now in setting up an exhibition room and putting adverts in newspapers My work would be more famous, but no better. We need to begin to understand that not everything that is publicised is good, and vice versa.

By saying this am I establishing a dichotomy between ‘exhibition’ and ‘art’? Not at all. Throughout history there have been painters (the vast majority) who were only known or who developed their art within a certain studio and for certain commissions and clients; only today are they known through the conditions brought by modern life such as the development of publications, collections, museums, exhibition rooms etc.. This is the very concept which should be evaluated, how works are publicised and in this context there is a procession of very great artists and very great actors.

But leaving aside my past, I think that the change brought about by a universal, permanent exhibition such as Internet changes somewhat the character of your original question. It is true that artistic work is fed by the need felt by a small elite to own it, but one of the main objectives of the artist is for his or her art to reach ‘everybody’, not just the tiny minority represented by an exhibition in a gallery and I believe that this Web fulfils only too well any desire for publicity.

If anyone asks you about your curriculum, What do you answer?

My work is my curriculum; it is the most faithful reflection of the truth about both the creator and the spectator. I have known columnists who see my work and are at a loss for words when they listen to this answer and who then, thinking they are talking to someone with no artistic baggage, make painful attempts to teach me about painting using arguments pitted with contradiction and conceptual disorder..

When I admit that I have never exhibited I think they misinterpret me. Life is a continual choice, when we pick one option we give up a million others but even in our choices, we must establish priorities and make new decisions.. I have concentrated my choice in the world of painting firstly on my work; now, with time and knowledge, I can pay attention to purely promotional aspects. I have painted all my life, I like painting, I feel painting, I love painting, I have never felt the need to put pressure on myself by exhibiting my work early. Just as a medical student is not so conceited as to call him or herself a doctor, I have tried to grow under the auspices of our past, leaving to one side the inherent criticism of the dynamic of exhibitions which act as a break on artistic creativity because they are normally held by people who don’t know how to hold a brush correctly.

Now, after cultivating chromatic, compositional and formal sensitivity, after feeling GREAT PAINTING through my brushes and embracing the thought of the GREAT MASTERS, now I can develop a closer relationship with he present. Now I do not mind showing myself to the world, taking part in an exhibition. Hanging a picture in a gallery in London, Paris or New York or another great cultural centre is a dream that is forming now that I have created, for better or worse, my own criteria.