I've always painted and drawn, ever since I was a child. Expressing the deepest ideas is innate to human beings: with words, with gestures, with music… I do it with pencils, brushes, paint and a support.
2. What time of day do you prefer for painting? How much time do you devote to painting?
I don't have a favourite time to paint. What I do need is to give the task several hours. To be concentrated, not attending to anything else, alone. To shut myself away and give all my attention and energy to solving the problems and challenges involved in the act of creating and painting. Since I also have to manage my time for other tasks (I'm an architect), I wish the day had more than 24 hours… that's why it's generally at night that I can isolate myself and put my effort into painting.
3. Of all the paintings you've done, which is your favourite? Why?
Lately I've been painting a series of portraits of women. I'd say it's a single painting with many faces. My favourites are in each of these parts of a whole, although in some of them, for their expressive synthesis, gestural suggestion and sensitive connotation, is the one I prefer. Though time changes my tastes, what doesn't seem so good to me today, after a while I say: “it's not so bad” and vice versa.
4. If you could be reincarnated as a master of art, who would you have liked to be?
One of the people who painted in the caves of Altamira. I think those guys knew why they painted, and besides, there was no money involved (it didn't exist and they didn't need it either). Those paintings, so powerful, so expressive, so justified, speak to us of a true art, authentic, uncontaminated, necessary.
5. What is or are your sources of inspiration?
The human being. Their gestures and attitudes, above all those of women. So suggestive, so evocative. To paint is to ask yourself questions. To paint is to question whoever looks at the finished painting.
Even in a landscape, the human is present in a less explicit way. Even in landscapes, they're the ones in my mind.
6. Of all the artistic movements, which one has the most influence on your work?
I don't identify with any movement and I don't want to belong to one. What interests me is painting. And I think it's better to always feel like a child, a savage uncontaminated by fashions and false poses. To face the blank rectangle as if it were the first painting ever. But you have to study the history of art to learn from the masters, to learn about technique and, humbly, to feel the weight of history. And anyone who has had the chance to study the past and its legacy accepts influences, which are many, some implicit, others conscious. I admire Goya, Freud, Picasso, Schiele, the pre-war painters of “the new reality”, the expressionists, I could name so many… I steal a little from all of them.
7. What does art mean to you? What role does it play in your life?
I live permanently, all day long, thinking and living around art, both through my activity as an architect and through painting, which takes up my time and my intellectual concern. I'm always thinking about what to paint and how. I'm very critical of what I do, I always express dissatisfaction with the results and I hope it's always like that. It's what drives me to want to improve, both technically and in what I want to express. Shaping ideas and mastering the material is an obsessive task. Painting casts a spell.
Discover Claudio's artworks here
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