From his fishing and culinary passion to his street performances, passing through his immersion in New York minimalism, his militant actions during the Franco regime or his suggestive destructions of the piano, his instrument, through which he opened himself to the performing arts, to cinema and the formation of creative tandems, especially with the filmmaker Pere Portabella, who often created scripts based on music, or with the multidisciplinary artist Mariaelena Roqué, artistic and sentimental partner for 25 years.
It is not for nothing that Carles Santos currently occupies all the attention of the Fundació Brossa – Center de les Arts Lliures. Nor is there an anniversary that justifies that the institution has involved the entire city – the Film Library, the Music Museum, the Grec… – in a Santos Spring whose central axis, the exhibition Carles Santos, and for what? , opened yesterday at the Center de les Arts Lliures. The artist died seven years ago and was born in Vinaròs in 1940… so when is not important, but where is. And the vital, brutal and universal artist of interdisciplinary poetics had begun his career as a pianist, until he took a Copernican leap when his mentor, Joan Brossa, asked him the question: “Do you know how to play the piano, and why?” ?
“Santos, like Brossa, start from the musical language to do many other things,” says Maria Canelles, director of Arts Visuals and Textuals at the Fundació, “and on the other hand, the differential feature of Joan Brossa is the work with the legacy: We are interested in putting into circulation the creative heritage of someone who worked from poetic experimentation. Put it in contact with the present and project it into the future. Because if Brossa picked up a relay from the past and catapulted him forward, Santos did the same with Brossa.”
There are doubts that a Santos legacy exists as such. “He would have wanted to burn everything,” recalls the curator of the exhibition, Ona Balló, who precisely in 2017, when the artist died, was preparing her thesis on the impact of Santos’ music on Portabella’s cinema. “His notes were a constant draft on which to touch up or make versions. He didn’t consider it finished and didn’t want to show it to anyone. Hence he wanted it to burn, but luckily it has been preserved.” Balló has immersed himself in boxes of documents, some unpublished, and among the seams he has been able to observe that “behind the provocative musician and the discourse of surprising images there was a composer of the first order, someone rigorous – not even throwing nets into the sea made him any way – whose performances… the piano in the sea, the piano on the Rambla or the piano on fire, could seem like improvisations, but they never improvised.”
All the archival work opens up a possible path for what to do with your material. And it allows us to see his previous work with the score, the way in which he provoked the energy he threw at the musicians. “They are scores that have never been published, which has been fortunate for us, since we have all the originals, we are between the work of art and the somewhat gray process of investigating an archive, between Vinaròs and other spaces,” adds Balló.
The Fundació Joan Brossa also works with the publication services of Barcelona City Council to publish the book . It will be released in May.
