Uruguayos (LIX-2) - Joaquín Lalanne (II) [Pintura, Entrevista / Painting, Interview]

SR: You are Uruguayan, but you were born in Argentina and now live in Catalonia. Tell us a little about this process of change and how it has affected your artistic work.

JL: Being born in Argentina was pure chance, my parents were working there at the time, in fact they met there but they are Uruguayan. When I was two years old they returned to Uruguay. For that reason I consider myself Uruguayan, but it is true that when I was a child it was strange to be told that I was not Uruguayan, in short, I always felt that it was a good thing to have two homelands!

I lived in the countryside seeing a horizon full of greenery, feeling the freedom. It was very strange when I moved to the city for school. I still came back on weekends. There I made things with my hands. I bought tools, cut boards and put things together. Then I did goldsmithing, I was very good at it, it was like an impetus in my search.

As for living in Catalonia now, it has given me a broader vision of the world. Obviously this is what happens to any emigrant, but I have never felt homesick or wanted to go back. I feel I belong to the place where I am, I chose to live here and now Cadaqués is my home, I have no plans to move from here as the place is an integral part of my life.

I always feel a very special affection for Uruguay, but with Argentina I don't have a strong connection except for the fact that my partner Verónica is Argentinean. Catalonia has also given me a work ethic and a way of doing things that has brought me many good things.

SR: Could you go deeper into your painting and that link between classical art, baroque, surrealism and pop art?

JL: Regarding surrealism, it was first of all when I arrived in Cadaqués, an emblematic place with a very natural environment, that I became aware of Dalí and began to read many of his books. Two of them, which I read when I was 22 years old, left a strong impression on me: "Diary of a Genius" and "The cuckolds of the old Modern Art". After Dalí I began to read about Vermeer and Raphael, I became aware of the transcendental of tradition, but I must say that it was Dalí's approach that made me approach the Renaissance painters with greater attention. That and the fact that I had the intention at that time to be able to master the technique, I was interested in the idea of the "window painting" and to achieve the third dimension. This guided my first steps in painting. Then I continued with André Breton and the surrealist manifesto, with the Count of Lautremont and everything related to surrealism. Obviously painters like Magritte, Paul Delvaux, among others, and especially Giorgio De Chirico, who was a bit like the father of the surrealists, were my references and are painters that I love. I never considered that I was doing surrealism nor was it ever a real intention in me, perhaps they were more labels that sometimes one is attributed, what I did know is that I liked the paintings to have a dreamlike touch.

Pop Art was mixed with all this experience that I lived when I arrived in Cadaqués and discovered Dalí. Pop Art already brought me from Uruguay. In my adolescence I liked Pop Art painters more than anything else in the world! Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenbürg, Andy Warhol, etc., but also Basquiat and the abstract painters of the 50s, Pollock, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Willem De Kooning and more. But, as I already mentioned, it was the Dalinian approach that led me to seek order and, then, to a more figurative painting. It was there that Pop and Surrealism began to merge as I tried to build a recognizable language of my own.

Baroque art is perhaps present in some works more than in others, especially in a series of galleries I made in the style of the painter David Tenniers The Younger. There are a lot of works by different artists and everything is overloaded with elements, but I think that my main references have been from the Renaissance. It is a painting that always moves me, I think of Raphael and it really makes me shudder! But also Quattrocento painters like Fra Angelico or Piero della Francesca.

As for classical art, the history of Greece and especially Rome fascinates me, more Rome than anything else, that's why there are often historical references and nods to the Greco-Latin past.

SR: You are an ironic and daring artist but you manage to give the work a dreamlike and vulnerable touch. Do you perceive yourself that way, as do those who see your work?

JL: I am ironic, yes, but never in a deliberate way, that is to say, I don't paint looking for someone to be shocked, simply the stories of the paintings emerge as I paint them. I try to build a world with rigor, with knowledge behind it.

For example, now I painted one in which Scipon the African, Mehmed II and Jeff Bezos appear, all immersed in a conversation. It came from reading about history and then reading Bezos' biography. I imagined the owner of Amazon telling the other two characters "boys sheathe your swords, now we control everything with computers" and in the play you see a bald man in a suit with a computer in his hand talking to two generals, one Scipon and the other Mehmed. Everything takes place inside a wooden box, hence the touch of vulnerability. The scales are always distorted and the characters occupy a position that is sometimes very flimsy. On the other hand, when I paint cardboard, I do it deliberately as a metaphor for our own fragility.

SR: You turn perspectives, atmospheres, sizes into playfulness. You mix the pop with the traditional, the comic with the "cult", to such an extent that the term "Lalannism" is already being used. Pictorially, is everything a game for you?

JL: I think I have always been guided by the idea of having a recognizable work, I never wanted to be an epigone of anyone, I was always clear that I have to build my language and for this it is important to know two things. The first is something that Dalí said "it is our duty to use what others have done and have done so well" and the second is something that the Colombian painter Fernando Botero said, a painter I admire deeply: "The History of Art is the history of personalities, there is no one who paints like this or that" there is Rafael, Velázquez, Picasso, those who have a voice of their own. I have tried and continue to try every day to build a language that is the product of all that precedes us and that reflects our place in the world today. As Sartre says, "each man is what he does with what was made of him". I mean, we are thrown into the world and we inherit a lot of things, what do we do with that? Me, I try to paint it!

SR: Besides, your paintings are a reference that constantly pays homage to the History of Art. Do you consider yourself a daring person?

JL: Freedom in art implies adventure! Daring is something fundamental for any painter. I am in search of freedom.

SR: What do you want your works to generate in the spectator?

JL: I like it when I can generate a reflection that is deep but ends with a smile, when a pop or comic wink closes a more complex idea. But it's not something I'm always looking for. On the other hand, I would always like the harmony of the composition and the palette to awaken the feeling that awakens the vision of what is harmonious and beautiful.

SR: What characteristics do artists from the past or comic book characters have to have for you to include them in your paintings?

JL: I like great characters, those who were able to shape the time in which they lived. That's why many times I have painted Napoleon or Roman generals but also philosophers or scientists like Nietzche, Darwin, Galileo, I have painted all of them. Now I remember a painting in which they all share the scene at a table and there are also Bugs Bunny and Olivia, Popeye's wife and an empty chair and a shadow that leaves the scene, it is the shadow of Christ who is expelled from the table. Anyway, there's nothing in particular, but I like important characters. I have no attachment to minimal stories or those marginal characters in history, they don't appeal to me at all.

SR: Which historical artist excites you, beyond admiration?

JL: Rafel, without a doubt.

SR: Do you think that in contemporary art everything is valid?

JL: No, I don't, and there are things that bore me more and more. Sometimes I find it unbearable to see exhibitions that I consider very boring, and which are inconsequential but are presented with an air of novelty.

SR: What do you feel committed to as an artist?

JL: To paint every day.

SR: How do you experience the evolution of your work?

JL: Now that I am 32 years old and I look back, I see a path. I am becoming aware of this evolution. I no longer have a father or mother and that has also made me see life from another perspective. Until now I had not been aware of the path as I am now, but what I am aware of is how exciting it is for me. I know that I have built "houses" that I will always be able to use, in that sense I have always known that generating pictorial resources was something very important. Now I am in the search for freedom and I feel well equipped to put up a fight!

SR: The mysterious halo you produce by intervening the lights in certain works, is it a product of the freedom you feel?

JL: I don't know, light is a fundamental element in painting. I suppose that there are works that with unfinished lights become more dramatic and mysterious and others, on the other hand, become more joyful. I have always been able to paint both.

SR: I suppose that so much perfection demands constant dedication, how many hours a day do you spend at the easel?

JL: I am now moving away from the more hyperrealist painting that I did in some years. It was very important at the time to be able to paint "well", to be able to reproduce colors and textures, but now I am looking for a looser hand and that also requires a lot of dedication. Painting is becoming more and more a pleasant for me. During the good times of the year I can spend between 12 and 14 hours doing things, some hours reading and the rest painting, but I never ever paint less than 8 hours. I feel ashamed when I paint so little and it gives me the impression that my life is passing me by. I would tell you that painting is the best thing I can do and it's the only thing I really like. I never have better plans than that!!!

SR: What are you preparing for the future?

JL: We will be present at fairs in different cities and I'm already thinking about an exhibition next year in Cadaqués. Of course I would really like to exhibit again in Uruguay where I haven't done it for 5 years. There is no lack of projects, what I lack is time to paint!

SR: You have ventured into sculpture, can you tell us more about it? How did it come about?

JL: I have made some installations and interventions in exhibition spaces.

As for sculpture, it arose from the desire to try to take the work to the third dimension. It's something I want to take up again now, because I really want to continue exploring and investigating possibilities of expression in that field; I think it's something great and that I want to develop in the future.

SR: What challenges does the future hold for you?

JL: To be as free as possible!!!!