Hypnotic, mysterious and a bit dusty. Magical hyperrealism in Ignasi AballÃ’s studio in Barcelona’s Raval. The space is a sculpture, the stage of a play and a workshop of dreams that are linked together in a garland of brown paper.
It is pure coincidence, but the date of the meeting is World Poetry Day. And that is what the artist offers to Magazine when he undresses his ideas, uncovers his works and unravels his truths. You also doubt him. He has turned 65. Time to retire? “Don’t believe it, I’ve thought about it.” But he is not retiring, quiet readers.
In the interview poets like Brossa, Eliot, Pound, Pavese become corporeal. Artists like his friend Carlos Bunga, Àngels Ribé or Gerhard Richter. Aballà is a poet. He models the void, like the potter and his hands; he chews it up and spits it out, just like in the Sinatra song.
The void realigned as it did in the Spanish pavilion at the recent Venice Biennale by turning the building 10 degrees with new partitions. The play was called Correction. A slight revolution that had a lot of architecture, sculpture and changing painting marked by the shadows staining the bare walls.
Are you one of the world’s most invisible visible artists or one of the world’s most visible invisible artists? And for the first time, the artist smiles. “Every day is like starting over. I want to look more at what I haven’t done yet. I have never believed that I have reached the safe and easy place. On the contrary, —he confesses — I need to surprise myself every day. When I go to an exhibition of mine, what I really like is to go nervous and restless to see if I have hit the key or I have screwed up. When that happens, I see that I progress â€.
On one of the walls there are cut plaster panels, remains of the Venetian pavilion that shocked the public and no longer exists. Beautifully arranged, cigar boxes containing newspaper clippings, broken glass pieces, strainers with cobwebs, spotless brushes…
How do you live a hangover after such a big artistic party? “It was a very intense experience in which you immerse yourself fully and it is true that when you finish you need a certain decompression, a time to situate yourself. When it finished I said to myself: ‘That’s it’ â€.
Aballà has ​​a very brilliant career, but far from fanfare. Joan Brossa, one of the artist’s favorites, wrote that verse that said: L’enemic de la Humanitat es fa publicista. He, the truth, has done very little publicity. “Consciously none, I haven’t paid much attention to myself, really (laughs). I have nothing against the networks, but I am not here to avoid this hypervisibility, the fact of seeing things before seeing them, sends the advance, there is no surprise â€.
And despite everything, the Venetian experience has definitively consolidated him: “I was at the last edition of Arco with my work present in several galleries and when I said my name I hardly had to explain anything else or say who I was. They told me: ‘Yes, I know who you are, I’ve been to Venice’â€.
From poet to poet to poet. Eliot dedicated his masterpiece to Pound as Il miglior fabbro (the best blacksmith). When looking at AballÒs work over the years, the question is: what exactly does this man do? Is he the painter, a magician who changes his costume every few seconds like Frégoli, blacksmith, interpreter of the void that we are?
“For bureaucratic purposes for the Treasury I am an artist and, perhaps, in part I am, I do not consider it,” he blurts out. What I ask of myself is to have ideas, the best possible ones. Many times, concretizing an idea takes me years. You know you’re interested in something but you can’t find a way to make it viable. Sometimes there are ideas that seem wonderful to you and after two days I say to myself: ‘But what were you thinking?’â€.
More poets and ghosts are passing through the studio. Pavese, who left two great verses for history: death will come and have your eyes, and one less dark: working is tiring. For many artists, what tires is resting and they sneak quietly to the studio even if it’s the weekend. Don’t worry, Don Luis Gordillo, we’re keeping your secret.
“We believe that doing nothing is a very easy, more idyllic state, but that is not the case. Sometimes I have fallen into the contradiction that trying to do little or the minimum and I have done a lot, even though in many of my works I try to question productivityâ€, Aballà confesses that, in reality, many days he does nothing. “Leo, I think…”
But you’re not going to retire, are you? “Retiring does not mean stopping doing, but at a different pace, taking the pressure off, the fairs… retiring from the more social, more public facet… There are many people around you, galleries, designers, curators, collectors… I have had collaborators in a very punctual and for Venice I had an assistant, who was so efficient that I decided to continue with him. He is an artist called Pedro Torres, who is very good, he masters the technological issue. I thought that many days I would not know what to order from him because I many days I do nothing. I read, I think, I am, but I don’t do anything productive”.
The river of dreams next to the artist already sees the mouth. He is very happy with his new project that he will exhibit in Vienna, one that talks about supposed mistakes of the past that are seen as successes in the present. “It will be in April at Galerie Nachts St. Stéphan and it will be called Bad, Rejected, Discarded, Abandoned and Finally Exposed Paintings. I discarded them, they were paintings that didn’t turn out well, and instead of throwing them away I took them off the frame and rolled them up. They were attempts to make monochrome… what is seen now, the attempt, the sides, the marks of the staples have a meaning. Why didn’t I throw them away? Maybe because I unconsciously saw a potential?
By the way… What are all these glue stains on the floor? Aballà laughs: “The gobs are by Jaume Plensa, resins… when he started to make the metal heads, he had to saw some of them so that they would come out of the door and go down the stairs to later weld them back in the gallery. I was waiting to come here so I rented a small space downstairs until he left and I rented it for a while with Salvador Joanperaâ€.
And the show ends with the magician AballÃ. And in the air there is dust, energy and emptiness. And also all the poetry that a wonderful morning has combed and has remained floating in the air.
