LLEI D'ART 11

How is your work different – what does it bring to the table? I think I have had a wonderful education: not in school, but in life, in my youth in Paris. Although I have never set foot in a fine art school, I would have liked to learn sculpture. It might have made things a lot easier. I think my art is on the fringes of the art world and impregnated with literature. I don’t share this absurd idea that a picture is just painting. When there are literary references I think they are very welcome. My coherence is incoherence. I think that the picture is an open situation where many things co-exist, zones of abstraction, and so on. Yet you have created your own language That is my intention. I answer your questions, which are making me reflect, but my answers are not thought out, I tend not to think much about that kind of thing. Is the art that predominates in the markets avant-garde? Here there is a problem of semantics. When something is born, it creates great confusion and people tend to consider it avant-garde. Then there is ‘the modern’. The most reactionary people in Spain are the most modern – that much is clear. The average Spaniard is bothered by not being modern, and arrogance in Spain is unimaginable. We didn’t use to be like that, and it’s a shame. We live in a society of lies and false truths. More than anything, we live in a country where people are frightened to lose their job. Artists can’t quite manage to express what they really think. What we put up with every day without batting an eyelid is what surprises me. Everything has become a kind of intolerable conformist sludge. Nobody says anything. Will we be able to change? I think that the recession has been one of the best things to have happened to Spain – not because of the people that have lost their job, but in improving our living together. The situation is such that we should make the most of it. I think that Spanish people are dynamic and are able to make sacrifices. I’m quite optimistic about this. Is humour at odds with art? You shouldn’t forget that I started out as a cartoonist. I published cartoon strips in magazines together with Antonio Mingote. That whole world of illustration and publishing, press and newspapers is magical. Really, I have lived off doing illustrations for Marie Claire or Elle . What is on your walls at home? I live well with other people’s paintings – I couldn’t live with one of my own. The painting belongs to me as long as I paint it, and it stops being mine when I sign it. They expire. Where do you this current art is heading? Today’s perversity means that we are training anonymous soldiers; people that only appear for a summer. Some galleries at ARCO present a young painter that lasts them a season. How is Eduardo Arroyo emotionally? Quite frankly, I think I feel how an artist of my age should feel, with the enjoyment of what I am doing and that selfishness that makes you count the minutes left, anxious about time ending and the time that is left, but doing lots of activities, spending the days working with a positive attitude. Luisa Noriega Foto Juan Manuel Miranda 58