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My Space
7 July 2019 2.00 h

Joan Mateu

Painter

Making the ordinary extraordinary

How has your paint­ing evolved in the past 20 years?
When you first start paint­ing, what im­presses you most is hyper-re­al­ism and being able to re­pro­duce a re­al­ity in an al­most pho­to­graphic way. Years later, as you get close to this re­al­ity and mas­ter it, you re­alise that this is not the aim of paint­ing. In a way that’s what pho­tog­ra­phy is for. Be­fore, I used to take it to the limit, I was afraid to leave things out, miss out things, but now I’m more at­tached to the nu­ances that make paint­ing richer; the fresher it is, the more gen­uine and the purer it is, and also, what mat­ters is what you trans­mit by it.
It seems as if your paint­ings have be­come sim­pler.
These are not paint­ings you want to load with too much in­for­ma­tion, or make a com­plex com­po­si­tion. Some­times the sim­plest thing, which by it­self has lit­tle in­ter­est, is needed as a point of ref­er­ence. It’s all about using paint­ing to give in­ter­est to some­thing that in it­self has none. Mak­ing the or­di­nary ex­tra­or­di­nary. This way a banal thing, once drama­tised, has more im­pact vi­su­ally.
You come from an artis­tic back­ground, but did you ever imag­ine you would be­come so suc­cess­ful?
When I started paint­ing I didn’t know I would be­come a painter and live off my work. It was more a case of dis­card­ing other op­tions. I dropped out of the bac­calau­re­ate as what they were of­fer­ing didn’t in­ter­est me, I found it to be a waste of time. Then I started work­ing in a fac­tory, but I knew my place wasn’t there. It co­in­cided with music and I started play­ing in bands, which I com­bined with work: In the end, I de­cided to leave it all be­hind and study Fine Arts in Barcelona. I was lucky to start sell­ing right away and I haven’t stopped since. It has all worked out quite well, so far.
Your paint­ings are all sold out...
I’m pleased my works are ap­pre­ci­ated. It was a risky thing to change my paint­ing style, you never know how the au­di­ence will react to it, but it came out well. The com­pli­cated thing in paint­ing is this: what­ever you do, it’s im­por­tant that you can be iden­ti­fied and recog­nised. Man­ag­ing to do this is the most im­por­tant thing, re­ally.
Do you know where you want to get with a new in paint­ing?
You have an idea about which di­rec­tion you want to go in, but the way of work­ing, which is more or­ganic, leads you to­wards un­known places... you get car­ried away. In hyper-re­al­ism, there’s no mys­tery, you know where and how it will end. The beau­ti­ful part of what I’m doing now is to see how the paint­ing is de­vel­op­ing, lead­ing you to places you didn’t know be­fore. It’s the great thing about art: it can’t be some­thing pre­med­i­tated. There has to be this risky el­e­ment.
Where do you stand in terms of style?
It con­tin­ues to be re­al­ism, but from a more pic­toric per­spec­tive. At school, you ba­si­cally learn tech­niques; they show you re­sources for car­ry­ing out what you want to do. They don’t teach you how to paint, no one can teach you your style, it comes from in­side. But mas­ter­ing the tech­nique is in­dis­pens­able in order to make what you have in your head a re­al­ity.
What about other new pro­jects?
I’m prepar­ing a book. I want to pub­lish a se­lec­tion of all the note­books I’ve been keep­ing through­out these 20 years: draw­ings, sketches, travel notes, a com­pi­la­tion of all the work that re­mains hid­den in them, ac­com­pa­nied by a CD with my music cre­ated here in my stu­dio.

my space - in­ter­view

The making of an artist

Joan Mateu Bagaria was born in 1976 in Salt (Girona) into a family of watercolourists. He grew up surrounded by art but it was not until 1999 that he decided to study it at La Llotja in Barcelona. In 2002, he had his first solo exhibit, followed by more exhibits in Europe and the US. He has won a number of prizes and is the author of the book El llibre de l’any, with writer Vicens Pagès.

Painter Girona

Joan Mateu

We visited Joan Mateu in his studio in the neighbourhood of Les Pedreres in Girona, an oasis of peace and greenery overlooking the city centre. Mateu shared with us some of the elements that are most important in his work at the moment.

1. Painting, and art in general, is about finding worlds that don’t exist, other realities, and playing with basic elements, such as this piece of cloth and the lemons from my neighbour’s lemon tree. It’s about looking for the essence of painting itself, more than just the topic, it’s what the search is about. With hyper-realism, you know perfectly well how the painting will end up. There is no mystery in the process. But this way, each painting leads you towards new places and opens up small windows that lead to the next step, it’s the evolution of it. Nowadays I like to play with textures. In fact, you never know if it is finished or not. I decide it’s finished when it convinces me.

2. Piece of furniture from the 70s, from my father’s office. I began using it more than 20 years ago when I first started painting, and it has stayed with me ever since. I tried other things that were more modern or more comfortable, but I never felt as at ease as with this one. I added the colours on one side, kept on adding accessories and adapting it to my needs. The two bowls of water are also my father’s, as he is a watercolour painter, and they date back to the same period. As for colours, I’ve got a lot here, but I use mostly pastels. The colours I’ve got are mostly for very occasional touches, basically I paint with pigments and wall paint. I also like mixing different types of paints for the effects and the different hues you can get. The importance of a painting is its pictoric richness, for it to be attractive by itself, so that it doesn’t need too many tricks.

3. Books. Reference points for me, which is the most important thing. Actually, such a thing as a self-taught painter doesn’t exist. Your painting is the result of various influences and your environment. We all have our reference points: mine include Hopper and Monet, and they have varied over time. At the beginning, I used to like more hyper-realistic painters, such as Antonio López, and now my taste is more eclectic. Yet even now when I see Monet I still like him; what he was doing at the time was so groundbreaking. In a way, art goes by cycles, as well. The abstraction and wisdom he had in the treatment of colour is still totally valid today. I also have here From Hell, a great comic about Jack the Ripper, by Alan Moore.

4. Notebooks. I always have one with me, even on my bedside table. I take note of everything that occurs to me; I make drawings, sketches, ideas for paintings...

5. Guitar. I have been part of a few bands and music is something that I will never give up. I play for myself, as a way to gain some distance from what I’m normally doing. When I’m in the middle of a painting, or doing something I am not convinced of, I need this break to see things from a perspective. I play, look at the painting, and ideas flow in. The music I play is basically 80’s punk rock. I listen to many styles but I always come back to the likes of Descendence, Dinasty, Bad Religion...

6.Skateboard. It is the same as with music. It matched the way of life and music of the time, the style that marked me and always accompanied me.

7. Small table. When I go to places I find wooden pieces, like old chairs. In fact, the upper part of this chair is part of that stool. I dismantle them and play with them and combine them with other items and materials I have, and new and unique things come out.

8. Sculptures. It’s a similar process as with the furniture. The wings of the angel are eucalyptus leaves and the back part is wood. I put together stuff I see, the rail is from an old house. It’s the same process: you get some elements together and you play with them.

9. Cloth, branches, lemons. These are elements that are the excuse or starting point to get to the pictorial. Cloth has a lot to do with my Costa Brava paintings, I started them because it reminded me of that. Cloth is a non-organic element, but is very expressive, so you can manipulate it the way you want.

www.joanmateu.com

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