I'm a hedonist in love with the images around me (even in dreams). I'm a pharmacist by accidental family tradition and I worked as one until 2012. In the same way that one day I discovered I had never had the faith I claimed to profess, I realised I was an artist and not a pharmacist. Forgive the catharsis, but realising that after fifty is a bit hard. I'm an optimist though, and it's never too late when it comes.
I like cinema, theatre, football, literature, the mountains, the beach, architecture and astronomy. And if on top of that I can photograph or paint all of it and give it my own view, then I'm happy.
When and why did you start creating?
When I was ten I copied a drawing from a comic and it came out reasonably well, but the people closest to me had already labelled me as not much good at drawing, and I spent endless years trying to work out what on earth Latin declensions and those unfathomable quadratic equations were. One day in August 1994 I discovered Corel Draw on the computer in my office. Several years (and a couple of drawing and painting courses) later, I had found out that this was my thing.
How do you think a gallery and its artists should help each other?
Are you asking me to butter up Artelista? All right then: you're an example. You accept anyone who wants to show their artwork (there's a lot of elitism loose out there), and you let the public judge the quality. The price is more than reasonable (I once paid 500,000 pesetas to exhibit for a fortnight in galleries that always had the same audience on opening night and that nobody visited the rest of the days). Thanks to the web my artwork can be seen practically all over the world.
What advice would you give to artists who are starting to show their artwork?
We show our artwork out of a need for recognition (otherwise you don't show it). But the important thing is to "create" the artwork, to need the making of it and to enjoy being in the making itself. It's the only "pure" act in everything surrounding the life of an artwork.
How did you sell your first artwork? Is there one you feel a stronger connection with?
I don't feel any special connection with any of them. The first one I sold was around 1997, Música enjuguessade, a soft stave dancing on a cream-coloured background, for 50 euros at the Centre Cívic Can Deu on Plaça de la Concòrdia in Les Corts, Barcelona.
What is art for you? What role does it play in your life?
God, what a question! Some say that we artists are the misfits, the mad ones, society's protesters. I agree. I belong to a group that isn't happy with certain herd behaviours that are imposed and accepted without opposition. Art, along with other commitments, is my contribution to the "powerful play" (Dead Poets Society).
My art is sometimes pure observation of small details, and sometimes a search for new realities that are worthier, more serious, more human, funnier, more interesting,...Art is the guide that lets me live my life.
What are your sources of inspiration? Do you identify with any other artist?
I've been trained (or deformed) in photographic framing. I go around framing images of everything around me. If you add to that an eastern love for the simple, the old, the things society at large discards, you have the secret of my sources.
I was moved when I got to see Kandinsky's Composición nº 7. I was moved again in front of a Ramo de flores by Renoir. What do I know?! Let me be a bit controversial, I love it: when I got to the Montón de platos at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, I couldn't take any more, and I promised myself I wouldn't leave until I'd worked out the message. Some god took pity on me and a bolt of inspiration ran through me like a runaway unicorn. Idiot, I'm telling you the artistic vision is in you, not in the thing!
In your creative process, do you have any habit, practice or quirk that's peculiar or curious?
I say an Our Father, a Hail Mary and a Glory Be, and then... No, no, sorry. I don't have any.
Have you had an exhibition recently, what can you tell us about it? Do you have any project in mind?
My last exhibition was in the street, at the door of the place I was being evicted from. It was a success. Almost all my neighbours have artworks of mine hanging on their walls for free. It's an honour, and I'm not joking. I'm waiting for offers from the most prestigious galleries. Otherwise, it's their loss and humanity's.
Could you recommend us:
An artist: Leopoldo Roca, my great-grandfather. I think seeing his paintings over and over every Sunday for long years in my childhood, like striking supraliminal images, left a mark on my unconscious.
An artwork: A painting I "grabbed" off the internet and did a version of at the time. It shows a writer in a melancholy pose, staring into the distance, with a background of round-arched windows. Marvellous light and colour. But I lost track of it and I don't know who it's by or where it is! Porca miseria.
A book: L'ombra de l'eunuc, by Jaume Cabré. A contemporary of mine that I identified with powerfully.
A film: Paint Your Wagon (1969) by Joshua Logan. Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood, a gem unforgivably forgotten. A hymn to excess, to madness, to freedom: an artwork.
We invite you to visit Lluís Girau's gallery on Artelista.
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