The same fight that abstraction and figuration maintain to prevail in his work – he defines himself as an abstract figurative painter – develops between reality and dream. Maybe they are two ways of saying the same thing. Dis Berlin (Mariano Carrera Blázquez, Ciria, Soria, 1959) assures that he finds no mystery in reality, and yet, in his latest productions, he has made an effort to represent – ??he rejects this verb in its most academic sense – with the maximum possible rigor everyday objects and landscapes. He has done it precisely to remove them from the context and show how disturbing the utensils are that we do not know what they can be used for in a new world. For this reason, still lifes are repositories of many meanings.
Who was considered an emblematic painter of the Movida Madrileña assures that the main novelty in his most recent paintings is the search “for a different register, atmospheres with a new light, landscapes that he had never painted before and that are a real challenge.” He conceives his life and his work “as a labyrinth, fields or paths, places to go, always with the feeling that something is open and you don’t know what you are going to find.” In this journey he has been perfecting his metaphors, as if by enriching the realistic details of the form he sought, paradoxically, to exalt its dysfunctionality or his alternative truth.
Since the mid-eighties, when this self-taught artist began to dedicate himself to painting with clear references to the early avant-garde, the main defining feature of his work was his metaphysical setting with which to offer, in his own words, “a window to another world, in which there is not the exterior, but rather there is poetry and mystery.” A universe different from the sensory one for which it was also necessary to get a pseudonym, which he chose in homage to a Lou Reed album.
He tries not to get bored “or bore anyone,” but remains faithful to the search for universes closely linked to phenomena that can only be understood through imagination or dreams. The avant-garde theories and forms that he admired so much as a young man were already integrated into the template from which he interprets the world, but he confesses that he continues to be impressed by the work of artists like Vallotton and the Nabis.
Like his objects taken out of context, he lives in Aranjuez, cultivating his solitude, almost “like a hermit. “I see my children and a few other people.” The world he lives in is, eminently, a mental and imaginative construction, made as a collage from cinema, poetry – he is a friend of numerous poets and writers -, music – he has paid tribute to Glenn Miller, Jane Birkin, Nina Simone or Verdi – and melancholy, “that always”.
He would like his paintings to be received as a song. Small injections of emotion that leave a message inscribed in the emotions of the listener. Citing the phrase attributed to Walter Pater, he believes that all arts aspire to be music. The balance in the arrangement of the objects in his paintings and in the sculptural installation that can be seen in the Sala Parés, as well as the silence of the spaces that indicate the paths of the labyrinth and the color combinations, seek in his works a a rhythm that could either be classical music – more Renaissance or Baroque than Romantic – or a ballad, because “it has emotion, ease of listening, and melancholy; There can also be sweet ballads, they don’t all have to be sad, although the best are the sad ones.”
Fascinated by pop music, especially North American and British – everything that was composed between 1961 and 1970 is incredible! Yes, I am an elitist, I am not at all interested in the exaltation of realism or popular culture,” he comments. The fact that Almodóvar is one of his most faithful collectors and has used his works in sets for his films and even in tattoos of his characters, responds, in his opinion, to the fact that “there are certain communicating vessels in our interests in interiors or the color”.
The loyalty of collectors and galleries such as Guillermo de Osma from Madrid has allowed him to continue investigating for more than forty years into the forms and possibilities of the universes he imagines. He returns to Barcelona after almost a decade without having exhibited in this city. He considers himself a survivor of the different economic crises that have threatened the art sector and of the contempt that he has detected in museums and institutions towards painting in this country: “the fact that the Reina Sofía Museum only does one exhibition a year of figurative painting is significant, for a long time painting has been considered not fashionable and those of us who dedicated ourselves have been marginalized, but fortunately that is changing. And I have been lucky that I have always had people who have been interested in what I do. I hope that beyond thinking that it is a pretty painting, they see that I have made an effort to open a window.”
Dis Berlin. Labyrinth of solitudes Sala Parés, Barcelona www.salapares.com. Until October 21
