“Beauty indicates that the human condition is in good health, like the rosy cheeks of the spirit.”
The cover he created for the Yorokobu special issue on beauty is laden with symbolism and clearly breaks away from the style of other artworks. Old, somewhat wrinkled paper, cherubs with bows and arrows, and a bald eagle as the enemy to be defeated. What did he want to convey with all this? What is beauty to this Menorcan painter?
Here’s what he told us.
Do you truly believe that beauty will save the world?
Yes. And it’s beauty that still keeps it afloat. To be precise, it’s not beauty that will save the world because it’s only a symptom. Beauty indicates that the human condition is in good health, like the rosy cheeks of the spirit.
And what causes beauty? Fortunately, I don’t know. First, let’s look at what causes ugliness: the blandly functional, the wildly reasonable, the absence of accent.
Can we imagine a world without beauty where we are still human?
How can it fight against the evils that lurk?
Nicolás Gómez Dávila hits the nail on the head framing the conflict:
“The primitive turns objects into subjects, the modern turns subjects into objects. We might assume the former is deceived, but we know for sure the latter is mistaken.”
In turn, Ernesto Sábato explains that man’s dominion over things looked promising until he realized that, in return, he had to turn himself into a thing. Art reminds us of this time and again: Charlie Chaplin getting lost among the gears of a cyclopean machine, Faust high-fiving Mephistopheles.
Sábato says:
“This is the modern man. He knows the forces governing the world, they serve him, he is the god of the earth: he is the devil. His motto is: anything can be done. His weapons are gold and intelligence. His procedure is calculation.”
If we think about it, almost nothing of the most important aspects of man is suitable for logic: not dreams, not art, not emotions, not feelings, not love, not hate, not hope, not honor, not anguish. None of this is technifiable, yet we insist on analyzing dreams, interpreting art, managing emotions, regulating feelings, planning love, censoring hate, mocking hope, demystifying honor, and medicating anguish.
It seems that deep down, we yearn to be machines… When did we lose sight that life is not a project? Is there a remedy?
Maybe we can combat the evils that stalk us by taking down reason where it doesn’t belong, restraining the coercion of life under the imperative of optimization, control, productivity, and quantifiable benefit. All words that sound cool printed in airport kiosk books until they cause a deep indigestion in the soul.
Explain why you’ve depicted the concept of the world saved by beauty in this way (old paper background, colors, inks, cherubs, eagle, lettering…)
The Fight
There are putti, those angels that flutter like drones over the heads of saints in museums. They are divine mediators and representatives of beauty, equipped with earthly feet and divine wings. They go naked because nudity, like death, is democratic.
And there’s the great bald eagle, the national symbol of the United States. But it’s not that I particularly want to criticize this country, but rather its lifestyle in general, which is like ours but taken to excess. They suffer like no one else being the embodiment of the modern man described by Sábato.
The putti, small but furious as hell, take down the Leviathan amid cheers and rock & roll. The outcome isn’t clear, but it’s clear there are good fights and they dodge well, which is hopeful.
With this, I aim to convey the epic of the little guys fighting against the great white whale, of the Ewoks holding off the Empire, adding a festive touch.
The Composition, A Greek Thing
The composition symbolizes a fight between the free fall of the bald eagle and the elevation of the angels. The composition is tense and dynamic at the same time, using a golden spiral.
This is hard to explain in a few lines. The golden spiral is used to express structural asymmetry in formal balance. A Greek thing. Sounds contradictory, but to express imbalance, a dialogue with balance is required.
In visual language, contradiction and error are components used to express life. This composition communicates the paradox that the fight is dynamic, that there is a certain concord in dispute: there’s imbalance, yes, but it doesn’t collapse, because the conflict itself is the outcome. A very geeky theme, I admit.
The Paper and the Weight of Decisions
The decisions made about a unique object tend to be inimitable, whereas decisions made about a common object tend to be routine.
I chose to work on paper from the late 18th century —bought at an antique shop for a fortune— because there’s only that paper. It’s as unique as a nose.
The ink is indelible, and I only have one chance to get it right, with no undo button or stock of old paper on Amazon waiting for a click.
I only care about decisions where failure has a price. Risk, commitment, and rock & roll, death to the great bald eagle. Because nothing is really worth it without the thrill of recklessness.
Lettering and Color
Communicating seriousness perhaps requires a particle of cheesiness, so I introduced a note of color with a childish connotation, altering the reading key of the tragedy. Transforming it, so to speak, into a kind of tabloid episode of the spirit. As Aki Kaurismäki says, “nothing is funny if it’s only funny.”
The eagle is worked with washes of grey ink, but its function is very prosaic: there was no other way to make it clear it was a bald eagle. On the other hand, the grey dramatizes its gravity, which also accentuates the volatility of the putti.
The lettering used is very simple: letters drawn as if they were clouds, preserving their legibility. Yorokobu, rejoice friends, because beauty will save the world. With a fight, yes, but rejoice, because it’s written in the clouds, which are the telegrams of the divine administration.
Tell me a bit about yourself. How would you define your painting?
My life isn’t very exciting, all I do is paint, read, and pet my cat Judy Garland on a small island. I remain conveniently disconnected and uninformed and I don’t care about anyone’s opinion; when their opinion is a croquette, I’ll ask for it.
My work is nothing more than a dump of dreams and concerns. And I’m talking about real dreams, that is, what I dream at night after reading something capable of stirring the furniture in the attic.
I don’t mind living in a world I don’t understand, and all I do is explore it through art, asking myself new questions. Deep down, I don’t care about the answers, because art lives from its problems and dies from its solutions.
If I’m afraid to paint something, I paint it; fear indicates what I must do. If it appears on Google, I don’t paint it; the search engine shows me what I shouldn’t do.
“A briefing in a painter’s studio is like a Marie Kondo breaking the magic in a student apartment”
If we accept that every sought-after style is just a pose, the style of my painting is my persona. A definition? Well, note this: my painting is nightly and unbribable.
I’m interested in how a painter faces a job that comes with a briefing with guidelines set by the brand, in this case, Yorokobu. I’m referring to format, name, etc., not so much to creativity which is, of course, what the author wants.
A briefing in a painter’s studio is like a Marie Kondo breaking the magic in a student apartment. Briefing means instructions, and they exist because brands do not admit unpredictability. Accepting it or not depends on whether it’s more of a challenge than a biopsy.
I think the best possibilities do not come from planning, for two reasons: first, because the nature of the opportunity does not allow for its programming; second, because plans are a genre of fiction.
The difference between trusting the artist’s judgment and trusting the briefing’s judgment is the same as between strength and display. Something interesting and spectacular, but not brilliant, can be produced from instructions.
A complex illustration becomes sluggish when planned, but it’s solid as a rock when it follows its own path. Unpredictable, true; but solid. Call me crazy, but instructions that exclude the unthinkable also eliminate the possibility of the extraordinary, which is memorable and has a unique accent.
That said, I perfectly understand working with instructions, but it’s necessary that the fears of the playwrights of the checklists do not brake the inertia of the creative engine. In essence, for a painter to give it all, all, all, the ideal briefing should be…
- Challenging.
- Non-descriptive.
- Open to considering the unthinkable.
Something tells me we can agree on this.