When in the mid-sixties the promoter Miquel Peirats proposed to the painter Maties Palau Ferré (Montblanc, 1921-2000) the exchange of a house and some land for his work, the artist thought it was very good. But when his popularity increases, and also the price, he doesn’t like him so much anymore, and one day he decides that Peirats already has enough of his work. The promoter, of course, enforces the contract and denounces it for breach. The case reached the Supreme Court, which in 1974 ruled that the artist still had to deliver more than forty square meters of painting to the plaintiff, which he did. Peirats, who for the public opinion had been left as the bad guy in the movie, gave the works to various town halls in the area. Palau Ferré burned the work he painted for ten years. An artist who at the time was close to Picasso (who blessed him as his successor), Miró or Dalí, who appeared on the front page of newspapers or magazines such as Lecturas and ended up alone. Each expiates the sentences as he can.
When Màrius Serra (Barcelona, ??1963) learned about the story, through an essay by the painter’s great-nephew, he was fascinated, among other reasons because for years he had worked on a novel about the destruction of a work of art, a project that in 2003 it gave rise to an interactive experience with readers of La Vanguardia that would end in another book. On Wednesday, La dona més pintada (Proa) arrives in bookstores, in which Serra part of the conflict to make a fictional novel that goes beyond the life of the painter. “I was interested in how we give value to works of art. Now that these days there is an Arco, and you see that stretched Picasso… it is no longer an aesthetic value, there is an advertising will. And here is a guy who burns what he paints, and I began to ask myself questions about the nephew’s story, ”explains Serra. The writer contacted the descendants of both sides: “One of the great discoveries was finding out the construction of a radically different story on both sides, and we held two meetings with Peirats’ nephew and eldest son. 50 years have passed, and it never ceases to strike me that a novel, a clearly fictional construct with a literary intent, may have helped in some way to resolve the weight of the past”.
In this conflict there is no winner: “There are two losers who atone for their guilt as best they can, one by burning his work and the other by giving it away. They mishandled it and it destroyed them both. Palau Ferré’s career was cut short, he became obsessed with this issue and went into a loop, and surely also into depression. In the process of writing and talking with different people I have been getting an idea, but a novel is not a territory of answers, but of questions and approaches”.
It starts from a lot of documentation, but it is a fiction, which alternates litigation and burning with artistic training in Barcelona and Paris – where he will meet the model that he will paint in many paintings. Serra novels the life of Palau Ferré until in the eighties they convince him not to burn any more works. He returns to painting, but his time has already passed.
In addition, the novel has a tail in the form of a long literary epilogue that explains the origin and development of the novel and some notes that indicate whether what is said comes from interviews, books or, also, from the “portentous imagination of the novelist (PIN )”. “I vindicate the imagination, because fiction can illuminate territories of truth, ethics and aesthetics in a very effective way,” he says. We are in a time when with so much autofiction, journalistic chronicle… fiction is belittled, when in reality it has supplanted it because there is no place where more lies are told than where they say they tell you the truth. The world of fake news starts from the impersonation of the romancero. I am a ballad, invention is fundamental in the history of literature”.
With a style that is both simple and literary, always close to play, the writer also reflects the face of love, “always the territory of fiction, even when we want to talk about reality, because they are matters of affection or expectations. Not that we wanted to be very rigorous, our memory is very selective and each one is the creator of his own novel: the autobiographical space is pure fiction ”.
Catalan version, here
