Interview

“…P- You are a figurative but not a realist painter. How would you define your work?

R- Defining oneself is always complex since I have never liked definitions and I do not understand why you have to use text to explain forms, colours and contours. I think my painting speaks for itself. Whether it connects with someone or not is another question.

P- Where does your subject matter come from?

R- I never pursue or seek out a specific subject, rather they choose me to be painted and belong more to the sphere of ideas than that of direct reality. The fleeting sight of my son looking at a cage, the landscape formed by the car’s rear mirror, are images that appear in my life as rarities or metaphors. For example the dodgem cars in an uncontrolled circulation always going round and round without any set course, are both very suggestive and symbolic; an ironic metaphor of our existence.

P- Do you not think that the use of these metaphors taken from reality have several interpretations?

R- It is good to open up different points of view: fundamentally it is about a way of looking and thinking and vice versa. Let the viewer make their interpretation. In the case of my Bullfighting , far from producing a bullfighting chronicle , a metaphor about love appeared . Bulls have a strong symbolic weight in themselves.

P- Your work makes me think about the cinema: nothing is static and everything moves, they are like fragments of stories. What do you think about this?

R- My visual education began with the cinema, not painting. My youth belongs to a culturally grey and sad period, in black and white but interfered with then by the emerging image of television and cinema. The only modern art museum in Barcelona was the one in Ciutadella, which apart from seeing the exquisite watercolours painted by Fortuny, all the pictorial daring was no later than the 19th century. For me this museum has its oddness and craziness, with so much “morphine addiction”, "tuberculosis" and "despairs", and forms part of my roots and I like it: it is like re-reading Poe.

In the cinema, in contrast, I found ideas in movement and subtleties without text. I entered into expressionism at the hand of Dreyer before that of Munch y and surrealism from the lyrics of John Lennon rather than the texts of A. Breton.

P- Your work features figures with their backs to us, embracing and in physical contact: Does this have any special meaning?

R- They form part of a reality or what I imagine as reality: they are generally images that are forged over time, and they certainly have a very personal meaning and I do not express them immediately. They are stored, they wander and appear alone forming part of a puzzle that is assembled piece by piece. This is why my work does not aim to redefine itself constantly along a specific line. I am not a painter of a single painting. Images always float through the memory.

My difficulty lies in painting them in the simplest and most essential way: it is a slow journey where in the end perhaps only a gesture or an attitude remains…”