In fact, the art in the last century, and so far this seems to be divided —but not matter-of-factly, of course— between an art artistic thinking and art of production of luxury objects aureolados for the fame. The artist linked to this latter pathway has taken the reins of a production company, has become an entrepreneur, given that it is not necessary the craft since the artist is sufficient to note that the work exists, for that something becomes immediately in art. To do so the style has to be recognizable as a brand displays at trade fairs, and are gilded with the glow in the auction. A biennial, it will be necessary to ensure its “artistry” pharaonic, for the showcasing of these neo-luxurious works. Although yes, let's face it, any idea-thinking house in your interior: perhaps the mere presentation strategy.

Keep in mind the dread of the artist to deal with your own thoughts, with such turbulence that the same excited that terrifies. The dangers of introspection, the self or the island of individualism solo, manages easily these days with the delivery of social, with the appropriation of social ideals that float in the atmosphere. There is nothing more liberating the terror of the thought itself that the political and social ideologies: an artist in the the fashion of commitment, there you have the issue! But that's not the thinking that creates the Art. That thing you try to define or describe does nothing to subtract dimensions to your greatness.

The amazing thing is getting to be aware of what is the human being; that to realize that he realizes... The inexplicable life or existence itself, the breathtaking Beauty formless and that affects us deeply, with the gift of pleasure that is the existence of the same and that for a few moments, it seems to make sense of it all. An impulse that leads us to the border of the thought and the limits of language, leaving us, literally, without words, and that makes the human being the true creator of something proper to it. Because the art is a human creation that is, as other lines of knowledge-thought, explain things, but oozing pleasure.

Pleasure, that light of Epicurus that lights our days. Wipes the aridity and soothes our pain. The pleasure in front of a work of art is known for sensitive souls: to the amazement, feel how it enters into us the sweet pleasure, how it spreads in our interior, even entornamos eyes to see in our thinking, the work seems to get rid of in the taste buds, producing a soft warmth inside. Fills our memory and the shortness of breath makes us throw a sigh. Cheesy description, voucher, but no less true, and that seems to be postponed from the actual words of the art. The pleasure continues to appear as something sinful, very own in the process of blaming so akin to our culture now, all filled with Ngos.

But, how is this sphere of thought of art that seem to fly over our head? The brain is the great wonder of nature; and the man's more, much more. We do not yet know almost nothing about him. Although it may seem that we think with words, actually in the brain flutter, a rapid succession of images, fragments of actions, places, real or imaginary, of concepts and forms, all continuously. There is more to be attentive at the time of the drowsiness to realize it. Such a mess entresacamos thinking, the conscious thought. Then, these thoughts, already prepared in a language that we understand, it can be reasoned, analyzed in their various options, and to distinguish the true from the false. Here lies a great danger.

Years ago, in 1999, as a predella of a box, I wrote that “No truth is totally true”. This principle of always having a slight doubt, bear in mind that a slight change in perspective on a concept that makes it a different vision, for me has been a great help ever since. The not reject a priori, anything, that your skepticism active, it follows, makes of this attitude is a source of possibilities, as well as a protection of the imposition of ideologies: it makes you incredibly free. Because the confrontation dualistic makes the paradox an item enlightening. The history moderna has given us a continuum of conflicting points of view, as for example, Florence-Venice, Neoclassical-Rococo, Ingres-Delacroix, abstraction-figuration, and so on. Long discussions on the issue have come to a rapid conclusion, contemplating both in unison, perfectly coexistent and without mixture of both; each part is what this is, but at the same time and space.

Eclecticism is a concept that today has little prestige, but instead of looking at it as a salad should esteem it as a fluid continuum where in each time we take the hand of that which is useful for us. The concept varies. It is the interplay of the concept which makes it attractive and live a whole. Is the concept of panopticon, vision in 360 ° what enriches; on the contrary, the narrow angles of contemplation, so typical of the modern movement in late, do not cease to be ridiculously constipated. The reinvention of the East, for example, the same as the reinvention of the West, nothing is truly “real”, only we have the pleasure to eclectic to imagine it, invent it.

One of the virtues of this freedom consists of a trip for the memory, your own to begin with, and by the immense legacy that human perseverance, carefully and facing atrocities without end, has bequeathed to us. This is the food of our knowledge and payment of our thinking. An art without memory is not possible. Without memory there would recognize things. It would be as if the words spoken were a sound unrecognizable. We could not articulate thoughts without that foundation of data that make up the language through the memory. We would be as in front of the babbling loose of a baby who lacks memory. For something Mnemosine is the mother of the muses. The art amnesic, of tabula rasa, what we imagine as the drawings scrawled by the hand of the same as the baby babbles, although some may consider it art. Oh, that phrase, “I've become a child,”... apart from not creérnosla never at all, in front of her the effort of hundreds of years of art seems to have been of little use. But also before the arsonists of the museum, the futurists and dadaists, apart from being skeptical with their positions and belligerent, I suspect that in the end this was not another thing that the indigestion and headaches produced by both art pompier. I call it “Indigestion of the Opera of Paris”.

But the journey through the memory is exciting; there are no roads or paths, and there are no developments or historical sense. We can move from one place to other, from one event to the other, completely different, to compare them, face them, entrelazarlos... Light, also, with the eyes of our time things that were not conceived as well, and give you new life-our life! There is No art of the past. All that has come down to us is in our present, in our space-time. What we can see with the same eyes with which we look at an object of common use today; it all depends on the sensitivity. In the background is like an immense collection of ready-made.

But there is another section of the artistic thought escapes us. Although we can analyze it afterwards, it is difficult to reasoning, perhaps because the part is immersed in the sea of the so-called subconscious, it is rather a conscious little attended to. There is a part of the brain that works continuously and by itself. Take a sip of you, it is very easy, we do it every day: close your eyes as you sleep and will start to appear images that change at a dizzying pace. Normally, this cinema is random it works always. But the vigil, the visions of the real things are so powerful that they hide so great theater of the mind. Since then it is the stuff of which dreams are made. What is it? where does it come from? I guess that the science will do so, and if it does not seem to me a serious fault, but I do not have arrived but slight information, and led to a world of organic functions more that aimed to discern how this occurs and how it involves us.

The human being has been discovered and used products that highlight this issue and several others nearby. The agents psychotropic drugs are very old, and in all cultures have appeared always related very directly to the art and religion. I know of No serious studies and profusely illustrated on this topic, and it seems to me inconceivable that have not been addressed in the studies of the art, and still more of the art of the last decades. Because a large part of the art and popular culture, the images, the fashion, or the design, even, are impregnated with psychedelia. Do you not have a genuine air of hallucination psychedelic things like grutescos, valances and lacerías of the Alhambra or the apotheosis of the baroque, but also Bosch, the Aurora Otto Runge, Gustave Moreau? I've seen things like this under the influence of drugs, staying out of it and frustrated by the complexity and difficulty of doing something like that after being under its effects. There is little specific literature and serious regard; he wrote something in the NINETEENTH century, something in the TWENTIETH century, “The doors of perception, Huxley, many things that are confusing in the 60's... But, of course, is prohibited. The agents psychotropic are an extraordinary material to think, to create worlds out of the back of the brain and to perceive what surrounds us in another way, bluntly, without varnishes moral and ideological. That is why they are so dangerous: reveal. They also make more fool the fools, but that's another story.

Recently I was invited to give a lecture at the Madeleine, in a Summer Course in Neurology. I was very much interested in attending to see what I was talking about a topic that interests me greatly: the relationship of art and the imagination. In general, the course proved to be too technical and physiological. It is already known that the science walks with caution... But some things that aroused in me a great interest. Among others, I remember a lecture from someone who was investigating a specific part of the brain associated with the phenomenon of religious, spiritual, or as we like to call it. A few scans of the brain showed a series of curves and concentric, from orange to dark red: the greater the intensity of red, more spiritual experience of the individual. I was astonished. That is, the ineffable, the expressions, let's call them mystical, had a place in the brain where it is produced such feelings, those beliefs. What would also be the same place where we feel the longing of beauty?

And is that the artistic phenomenon has been associated from its beginnings with the religious. Although I am convinced that the first artistic manifestations were the dance and the music side of their rhythm. The cravings, and not known, led to the artistic. The death and the burial, the places that acquired the category of special or sacred, the first cults, all of them dressed in a primary form of art. The narratives of facts, the attempt to explain natural phenomena and cosmic, gave rise to the myth. This, by dint of repeated, he went on to be a “truth”. With this came the belief. But all these things had at its base the playful aspect of listening to stories. Had a dimension pleasant in its origin. We just need to remove that imposition of the belief, dogma and irrefutable, to re-shine your facet purely artistic. The contemplation of rites, idols or temples, without the constraints of the intransigence of the creed, it becomes beautiful art.

What, if not, happened in the Renaissance with the recovery of the world of the myths greco-romans. I can't imagine believing the humanists in Venus, Hermes or Dionysus, but in contemplating and liking your side symbolic. Imagine the result of all this: how many wonderful paintings, sculptures, operas or poems gave such a contemplation without belief. How much imagination created by the reading “descreída” of the Bible or the Mahabharata. What mighty works born of the christian faith that fill our spirit differently as it claims to their dogma. Blessed red spots of our brain...

There is another faculty of the brain that I don't know if it is generic or specific. I cannot find mode to find out. It is a certain sense that allows me to see the geometry of spontaneous and concrete. Just more than three points are aligned in a chaos of points to immediately see the line that connects them. Very young and perceived the structural lines of the pictorial composition in the works of Caravaggio, Ribera, Rubens, Botticelli and more take a Poussin or the cubist... I saw clearly the geometric systems that formed it. Also, with amazement, in the visions kaleidoscopic, produced by LSD, he perceived how geometric structures were interspersed by the space, or the contemplation geometric perspective, moving through the spaces. If I always liked the geometry, from a certain moment I really need: a box is not structured, not measured in parts in relation to the whole, it seems to me less beautiful than the one made after a meditation of this type. I think that the consciousness of the geometry is a human ability.

There are also gifted artists. Or that manifest soon, their attitudes, or to which a certain teacher or the teaching spark their qualities. This gifted artist not doubt to the hour to run, it is an eye with a hand of an instant way to translate what the eye sees. His head appears to be free. Well-known is the story of Rubens to deal with complicated diplomatic affairs while she couldn't stop painting her canvases. I remember how, when he was a child, appearing in the films skilled draftsmen in the trials, capturing the vivid expressions of the accused. Seemed to Me admirable. I barely managed to Bambi became something funny. But there is another type of artist. Usually his approach to art is by the admiration that produces the same art. The parents did not lead them to teachers of paint, don't even think about to study Fine Arts. In the artists of my generation, what is certain is that there were hardly any that had been passed by artistic studies regulated. Made in Philosophy, History... I studied Architecture, as many of my peers. You looked at the painting and drawing with the same analytical eyes that looked at the art in general.

The artist “clumsy”, not having any training, you do not have a way to solve things. Has watched so much that it has an entire repertoire memorístico shapes to paint or draw. And doubt. It is fair to such doubt, fully aware, where lies the “clumsiness”. See how you can solve in every moment that you have between the hands: he could be like this or like that, but also this another way... Even a glimpse of long, when there is, it is a matter of long insights. Cézanne is the clearest example of the painter “clumsy”. Strokes to short van as, modeling the matter along to lines that overlap to find the ways. The artist “clumsy” pick up the brush and the pen from the surface and stares-thinking of a good time. Nothing artist “action”, that was always looked at with some suspicion: though we may admire them, we find all too primary. This mode of work of the artist with no skills makes that moment of thinking to be a great intensity, even more so when used techniques are difficult to fix. Exercise the thought pictorial as much as the physical action of painting, and the time's going by right-handed in this hybrid which is, without doubt, provides a different way (less than professional-producer) of doing things (more, if you like, conceptually).

For an artist of this kind, as is my case, the ideal means is the drawing. Not only because of the quick link thoughts-hand through an instrument as simple as is the pencil, but also because there is the eraser. Perhaps the act of doing away what you know is not what you want to have as much importance and lasts as much as dedicated to making things appear: the draw you contemplate what you have done, what you leave if you accept it as valid, or you disappear totally or partially in any other case. Although the idea will excite and the rapture takes you, the process is always the one that corresponds to a building. Create the main things and the relationships act as a structure. While, time to think during their progressive and built appearance. The long process of sketch to that submit a work before its completion form part of this ritual. Maybe achacará more than one, the lack of freshness in all of this. But something intended to stay in the tempo I ask for more grace to the gait of a newborn. All of this may seem like a thing old, but I assure you its rarity distinguishes it from the modernity academic that surrounds us.

The paint is still. Art is a static, compared to other genres, which move in the space-time. Music, dance, theater, or literature, they all require a course to be developed. Even the architecture, so apparently static, you need of That dimension to its fruition, as it forces us to follow in his way, in his own time-space. We cannot slow down or stop a symphony, and the most we can do is pick up the eyes of the reading to think about it without that escape us. But before that, the performing arts or living room, we doblegaban to them in the same space, where they are produced. But a day came the sound recording and, above all, the film, the great invention of the TWENTIETH century. Finally, the movement could be replicated!, and this changed his life: everything was moving, everything was a frenzy. But the paint is still.

For more than the look doesn't move, and it is this stillness of its main virtue. We can let time go by without any change. If the paint involves thinking we need that time to produce in us ours, to make them flow into our meditation. The stillness makes you think, like a zen garden, as the desert. This calm makes us anchorites delivered to the contemplation of the box, and of the thoughts which he produces. Allows us to isolate and live in a particular world and intimate. The painting represents the moment. The painting is not narrative, because, even though we tell stories, it is in a specific moment. There have been samples of a narrative art in painting, with various scenes from the same story. But the vast majority of the paintings are a snap. Depends on the skill of the artist to suggest the before and the consequences later. Although it tends to fall in the temptation to represent the high point, is of greater skill and more difficult to stay before, in the crescendo of the story. Because almost all the paintings are narrative, have something. Until the abstraction more concrete is narrative. Don't say that Black square or Square white on white Malevich not tell us stories! That's why the painting draws us both: there's no time no time, space, on a flat surface, and stories in an instant.

We can even bring a reproduction of the box as if it were a picture religious. On my nightstand I have a pile of postcards of my favorite works that I look at before going to sleep, as if they were prayers of my saints protectors. In front of my bed in Tarifa I have The Ideal City of Urbino, and, in Seville, The Annunciation of Fray Angélico del Prado and Descent From The Cross Van der Weyden, that I look with the same relish they get from their faithful boxes, religious meditation, but in this case, meditation is artistic, and the result is the immense pleasure of art. But, in the end, it is not necessary to defend the paint, not to speak of new avenues for her not to do another thing, in the last instance to be stripped of its simplicity, one of its virtues. Only, and not necessarily, you need good ideas, and sensitivity to taste.

The world of inventions and appliances novel that we contemplate with awe in fairs and exhibitions has always fascinated me. The world of machines was soon to make their appearance in the art to which the dadaists and constructivists were aware of something that almost everyone felt: the machines were fascinating, even erotic, and have a body! But what we call today the technology do not have it, we don't know very well what is going on. Only one screen, communicates with us, the rest is —strange word— virtual. Is the new artistic technique, amazing. There is nothing corporeal nature, are only ghostly projections that we can set with a print. The work does not exist in any part, it is virtual, we only have your printed image as a projection of the beyond. In that beyond is everything: what has always been in museums, in books, in the cities... now you're in that other world which is revealed to us before the invocation of his name typed. Instantly. Everything is instant: the letters arrive at the time, by very far, which is the recipient. The news are in “real time”, everything is universal and instantaneous. Things build up and we just have occasion to notice of them; the past fades until it disappears in a blink of an eye, without having had time to serve you. There has been No reflection on the experience. Has not given us time to analyze in depth nothing ever seen or lived, nor to compare things, allow them to stand or see what happens with them. It is the culture of the moment. Everything lasts very little, as the news come pouring in and what you want to surprise are the new features, even if they are after pure packaging of nothing.

Are the new times in which it seems mandatory to participate. As with everything, always appear inputs interesting, even fascinating. As those funds in a movie with fantastic landscapes and cities. Always on display, always on that surface between our world and the virtual one. The architectural drawing has gone to meet up with those prospects in 3D that can be seen from all sides. It draws on the screen, the photographic image serves as a base, with the consequent realism, compared to the invention, which barely exists.

But the artist always tries to find what is not there and, as a result of this, drawn. This technique has become a new health, especially among the young. Is drawn delicately, with care and meticulousness. Are these new generations, for which the no future since you are here, young melancholy that I feel so identified. The repelús that I can produce a virtual, on them crystallizes in a strange sadness of longing, of an inner world and your own. These are new times. So much technology, so much technique applied, so renewal of languages, that makes us want things simple with a warm interior. It is what has always made the art: imagine what you want. Desires are on the other side, well other than the epatantes scenery technology.

The belief that “no truth is totally true”, leads us not to believe, to feel. Like the things, get excited about or perceive by the senses in depth; it does not need to believe that something is true. We can get excited about a piece of theatre, cinema, or literature, up to the edge of tears, without thinking that the fiction is real. Art has always played with it, is one of its pillars. If we apply this to the world of the theories, customs and dogmas, we will be freed from the tyranny of taxation, without getting lost in the paladeo of what we like.

The unveiling, the remove of our eyes-mind filters which prevent us from seeing things in all their aspects, to have a position distant, shows us a world that is much more rich, ever-changing, ambivalent. But your aesthetic taste is one of the issues that are most loaded of glazes. The process of austerity growing, of a strip of tasty, withdrawal, emotional, has marked the modern movement. Everything that seemed excessive, popular, or that tore emotions sentimental, has been purged. All of that has been floating around us until timidly to the Pop movement ajar a door through which we admire in amazement other things and sparkles. Two backgrounds took care of this issue, as of many others: on the one hand, Duchamp, who proposed the indifference as a method. A ready-made choose by your indifference, not because it is beautiful or ugly. It is this apathy that surprise us, and produces in us the amazement necessary to make us think. Dalí, for his part, he was immersed in it phenomenon. He was one of the first to realize that the "kitsch" there was a whole universe of things attractive: how wonderful to terrible. We do not wonder that you were both assigned today, the nickname of the “fathers of Pop”, among other things.

Lift up the veil of the good taste tax and we will be in a landscape full of things attractive and tasty, joyful. Another of the veils more persistent we could define it around one of the tics more marked and striking of the “clergy of contemporary art”: one can't ever mention the word “beauty,” it is a taboo. You can do all sorts of circumlocution to avoid naming it. At the most they can get is to define it as an “aesthetic experience of the senses”, or something like that... Never can pronounce the word “beautiful”, because for this you use the “interesting” Or, another example, are not appoint any creation prior to The young Ladies of Avignon (1907); what is more, in case you need to use the reference to antigua as a reference of a contemporary piece.

The yarn for this, let us recall another eye-catching precept of its creed: the evolution of the art; the belief that the art changes to improve and adapt to the social media. What I call the “evolution of darwinian of art”, which naturally leads to consider the modern movement late as the summit of the art indisputable, that is, you should not forget it, is simply an act of faith. When the evolutions, that exist, are given in a short period of time to lead to a rupture, while around him there are continuous small eruptions individual or small schools. Taking a panoramic view of the art we note that it is modified in a way capricious, and that rarely stays in their ways, manners, style, etc more than fifty years. How much time do we have of the modern movement, maintained a force of power and dogma? Power is located and embodied in places such as museums, exhibition halls, means that you are pointing to the list of new values, and the already sacralizados. It is curious to analyze how to set up these lists who pass magazine in magazine, curator to curator, from fair to fair. In general, the onset typically occurs in the word of a high priest who is caught with reverence, and extends between commissioners with the desire of being the first to expose it next to the galleries that are waiting for immediate revaluation. Many artists inflated I have known in my long life, how much work is silly, much idea is weak but illuminated with convenient glow...

But the worst is in contempt of an artist of worth, some extraordinary, that they have not received a timely blessing are lost to the world in those lands that do not have the attention or prestige. Waiting for a commissioner to see theme for display as a novelty. Perhaps it has always been so, but today I see that it is even more drastic, the entire process of their operation. But let us continue in this sad state that usually define as “depression artistic, status, and avolition that comes to stop my intense activity, and alejémonos a little of the narrow circle of art to look at the big picture.

The great majority of the human race is not interested in art at all. Completely lacks that which we call sensibility. This absence is not directed only to what is beautiful, but also, to the ugly. Gives them the same, so the cities are so ugly, and that's why the homes and things without appeal does not affect them. 't care a damn that your neighborhood is hideous, load the coast with buildings horrible, to make television programmes that stir the guts or go dressed as adefesios. It is what it is, really, to speak with clarity, not in our small circle of those who still love the art and the beauty, but it is what it is. For them we continue to be artists, mere manufacturers of luxury objects. What's more, when it comes to fame —one of the foods of the mass—, comes the artist to become another object luxuries that graces the holiday and the photos of the powerful. Do you even think that the power, the large financial firms, the football viewers or the mass in general have some interest in art? “Ah! are you the artist?”, he asks with a half smile, don't know if irony or “this is a face, grabs his wallet”. So much struggle from the Renaissance to be treated as something more than a craftsman, for finally dropping it and jester rich. True that there are collectors (and other agents of our world) who love the art, some passionately, and linking the fascination of the piece with the desire of possessing them. But we know that there are many others who see only the investment of your money. Just a crisis to reach a minimum sales, and yet the high-end vehicles are still sold with equal swiftness. While, at the auction, the works appear with ridiculous prices, showing that the valuation which is at the same level that his love of art...

What does all this mean that, in this change of civilization in which we will pass the art humanist, the art is made by and with the measure of the man, with his memory, with its myths, with the taste refined by the passing of the centuries, made to stay and marvel? I put the name of “The new average age of technology” in the world that is sensed. The neo-bizantinismo is already here. With soccer instead of racing cars, but with the same gigantomachy of its airports instead of baths. And what do those of us who love the art?, do you compulsively do art, if you are the icing on top of a gigantic cake, completely dispensable? It seems appreciated its existence, because it wears well, and asea a little, the dirt on the power. But, as I say, he is not interested in nor give a rat's ass.

Do we leave the monasteries? Although beautiful, is more of a metaphor. But it's going to end up being something like that. Because elitism is not desired, but they seem to leave no other remedy. In my first exhibition, in the Gallery Amadis, now forty-two years, I put a sort of pamphlet with a series of points about my interests then. One of them said something like this: “I am interested in a craft that works on all levels of culture”, with a definite stop between utopian and boy pop of the late 60s. But somehow I'm still thinking about it. The modern movement has largely to blame. If, instead of his neck stretching as a lecturer at the Bauhaus his ideas would have been more of a “boy pop”, the thing would have been otherwise. Today aim to bring the masses to the museums, just as art has never been more elitist, even though I put Djs blaring on the inside... But as each day becomes more the cultural level on the television, in the cinema, in the so-called cultural programs —where often people of course level, we say there shame of others—, the day will come when you talk about certain things will be considered offensive to society, annoyed by talk of a so elitist.

Reflections such as these are flying through my head while I'm working. Painting and drawing have this ability to allow free a stir of thought, though some of them do not help much. Why am I doing this work? Why such dedication to art, if it is not because it's born in me ideas that I want to see in the real world and not in the thoughts. But, if I already perceive in your mental state, for what that obsession with that charge your body and make it reality, tangible? Well, simple, because I want others to see and share with me in the excitement of their existence. But who are those others???, who do I address both effort? Only a small circle to get to them, the rest only have a brief observance in which it is impossible to venture into the complex maze of symbols, references, winks, geometric relations, new solutions, all those things are so alien to the art instant prevailing today. Only in my island, yes, but I like this. I will entertain and occupy my time in a way entertaining, and goes flying. It is my fun, my way of feeling life and see how it goes leaving things that I can see and touch, such as a time crystallized. A thought crystallized. It will be a mania, obsessive, perhaps, but how much enjoyment I get from it, what immense pleasure of that longing of Beauty! And how many things has taught me in all these years; these beautiful things made by the human being, which lives in harmony with nature, the places, customs, feelings, secrets, together with the big dreams and worlds imagined. The art of all times has taught me one thing: that the human being has always been astonished to realize things.

Guillermo Pérez Villalta

Transcription and edition: Óscar Alonso Molina