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Q. First point: how do you prefer to label or classify your work: electronic art, video art...?
A. I simply consider myself as an abstract painter. I use 3D commercial software in order to produce video layers containing animated objects. I modify and extend that layers through digital painting software. I go from 2D to 3D as many times as necessary until finishing the work. Although I use informatic and electronic devices, I consider my work as painting, abstract painting to be exact.

Q. Would you kindly describe the series of abstract videos named "The Kali Suite"?
A. The paintings of this series are developed in the three classical dimensions of painting, width, length and illusion of depth, and, also, in the time dimension.

Since I was a child, illusionism in painting fascinates me. In other words, the picture as a window. In my opinion, this fascination is what defines a painter as such. My paintings are the product of a certain violence against illusionism but inside illusionism. They are, in this sense, in the tradition of Magritte and Escher, although from an abstract language. On the other hand, I have always got inclination toward the time arts, especially music. "The Kali Suite" has allowed me to gather all these interests in the same work. I have achieved some pieces that I would describe as hypnotic because, in my opinion, they are able to subtract the mind of not visual thoughts, at least during some time.

If you let me a parenthesis, I will tell you it is not impertinent at all to relate hypnosis and plastic arts. Hypnotic suggestion was historically achieved with the aid of visual devices like spirals rotating on its own center. I remember to have seen this kind of machines or similar in certain movies. The Duchamp's rotoreliefs and some kinetic and op artworks of the fifties and sixties, seem to me linked with these devices.

Finally, the reduction of the mental conscious activity in favour of the unconscious, through certain sensitive qualities of artworks, is, without a doubt, a classical strategy of art.

Q. You have commented me that you are near Magritte and Escher. Could you contribute other reference?
A. I think it was Walter Pater, the influential british critic of art, who affirmed in the XIX century "arts in future will inevitably tend to music". At least regarding painting I think he guessed right. If there is a dominant tendence in painting of the XX century, this is abstraction. And if painting was made abstract it was in order to be like music. However, only an small part of XX century abstract painters became interested in time as pictorial work dimension. I refer, of course, to that denominated abstract cinema of Eggeling, Richter, Ruttmann, Fischinger, Moholy Nagy and, later, Norman MacLaren, the pioneers in this field. And locally the Jose Antonio Sistiaga's artwork. My painting belongs to this tradition, although my abstraction is quite different.

Time in my painting was initially an instrumental aid. I needed to introduce time because I needed the movement in order to reinforce the illusionism. Movement made more effective the background-figure paradoxes which I had worked since my Malevitch+Magritte synthesis and the explicitism in 1987. This kind of dance that I obtain by adding the time dimension to paradoxes offered me lots of work chances.

Q. Your abstract videos are completely silent. This seems to me a significative difference regarding most of your predecessors.
A. That's right. At the moment, I prefer not to affect the perception of painting with audio neither music. Although it would be very easy. Certainly.

This art is an abstract art and is developed in time. Therefore, It's near music. I understand the enthusiasm of many of my predecessors by experiencing this mixture, that, in the worst cases, reduces the visual part to a mere illustration of music. In any case, I don't share this dependence. I claim animated painting as a subspecies of painting, not of audiovisual.

Q. The videos of this series are circular or recurrent. Have you chosen this type of temporal circular structure for some particular reason?
A. The temporal circle relatively small, I understand it produces in audience the false confidence of finally they are going to dominate it, what I found quite interesting. Too long cycles, or very closed finals and beginnings, they would redound in artworks with minor capacity to catch the eye. On the other hand, the idea of infinite work in time, perpetuum mobile of the Renaissance scientific tradition, seduces me very much. All my life I have got a certain tendency toward this type of structures, underlying, for example, in baroque music, that, by the way, I find fascinating.

Q. What are you planing as a video painter at short, medium and long term?
A. I aspire to be a virtuoso in the movement on picture, an authentic expert in time as pictorial component. Regarding the background-figure question, I think I will continue deepening in paradoxes more time. Well, each artwork is a world and this is an art at its beginning, I think.

Q. You are a late painter. What importance do you attribute to begin a career as a painter, between quotation marks, near the forty years old, in our time, when the youth of artist is almost considered as an aesthetic category?
A. (Laughs). I don't worry about it. Not to paint very much in many years it doesn't mean that I hadn't very much thought in painting . It doesn't mean I had not evolved as a painter. It's possible to say I have painted few pictures but very much time each one. I simultaneously tried to be useful in another activities, what sometimes it could be good for an artistic career, even.

On the other hand, I have needed many time to acquire enough domain of machines. Only computers and programs have liberated the necessary technological forces for the existence of painting like mine.

Q. Finally, I request you that you satisfied the audience's curiosity regarding the series title.
A. A suite is a series of musical pieces, originally dances. The suite is also a room or a group of rooms. In hotels, the suite is the most deluxe dependence. And Kali is, as you know, a central character in the Hindu religion. In the hinduist cosmogony, Kali is the motor agent of the infinite process of creation and destruction of the world. She is the time goddess by antonomasia.

KALIDOSCOPE

“Recuerdo una conversación entre dos estudiantes, uno pintor y el otro músico. El pintor decía: !No comprendo cómo podéis dar unidad a las partes de una pieza musical, si nunca se os presentan al mismo tiempo! El músico le aseguraba que eso no era una grave dificultad pero añadía: !Lo que yo no comprendo es cómo vosotros os las arregláis para no perderos en un cuadro, sin saber por dónde se empieza ni por dónde se acaba, ni hacia dónde hay que tirar en cada punto!”
Rudolph Arnheim.

“El círculo es horrible.”
Eduardo Chillida.

“Kali: (Sanskrit: "Black"), in Hinduism, a devouring, destructive goddess. In accordance with the Indian predilection for bringing together seemingly contradictory aspects of life, Kali is a fierce, terrifying aspect of Devi (the supreme goddess), who in other forms is represented as tranquil and pacific. Kali is depicted as a hideous, black-faced hag smeared with blood, with bared teeth and protruding tongue. Her four hands hold, variously, a sword, a shield, the severed hand of a giant, or a strangling noose, or they are stretched in a gesture of assurance. Kali is naked, except for her ornaments, consisting of a garland of skulls and a girdle of severed hands. In painting and in sculpture, she is often shown dancing on the inert body of her consort, Shiva.”
British Enciclopediae.

“Lo ideal sería poder repetirse como... Bach.”
E.M. Cioran.

"El tiempo es la condición formal a priori de todos los fenómenos en general."
Emmanuel Kant.

“De ahora en adelante el espacio por sí mismo y el tiempo por sí mismo están condenados a desvanecerse en meras sombras y sólo una especie de unión de ambos preservará una realidad independiente.”
Minkoswski.

“Puede preguntarme lo que quiera, excepto sobre el tiempo.”
Napoleón.

“Sorprendido en la calle por el misterio del Tiempo, me dije que San Agustín hizo bien en abordar semejante tema dirigiéndose directamente a Dios: ¿con quién debatirlo si no?"
Emile Cioran.

“Una obra de arte está más lograda en cuanto su idea central se encuentra más profundamente enterrada en la sustancia expresiva."
Friedrich Engels.

“Todo se desintegra y se reintegra; eternamente se construye el mismo edificio del ser. Todo se separa, todo se junta de nuevo, eternamente permanece fiel a sí mismo el anillo del ser.”
Friedrich Nietzsche.

“Si queréis saber en qué consiste mi vocación, diría: alcanzar el absoluto, esforzándome en elevar siempre más el grado de maestría de mi arte. La dignidad del artesano. El nivel de la calidad. Perdida por todos, porque se había vuelto inútil, y sustituido por la apariencia, la ilusión de la calidad.”
Andrei Tarkovski.

"Más eficaces aún son los depósitos espacio-temporales: nubes, olas, follajes, llamas, en los que un ligero estremecimiento en el tiempo añade la ilegibilidad. Hablar de fascinación no explica gran cosa: podríamos adelantar, más últilmente, que ante tales espectáculos, nuestros detectores de motivos están en reposo porque son impotentes. Este reposo, especie de vacación embrutecida que todo el mundo ha experimentado, es efectivamente euforizante, porque desanima la interpretación racional que no controla más que la forma.
Grupo Mi.

“Lo sublime es lo horrible que aún somos capaces de soportar.”
Schlegel.

“In a structuralist view of a representational visual form of communication such as painting, the meaning of the visual image is not derived from what it represents but rather from the convention for how it represents it. A structuralist approach to understanding painting will try to make explicit the codes that allow for a meaningful representation through an iconic process. For example, in a portrait or a still life of fruit on a table that is realistic or even photographic in its representation of the subject, the meaning of the painting is derived from how the subject is represented: how accurately, with what expression, with what surroundings for the subject, in what lightning. It is not the fruit in itself that is interesting (although the choice of fruit and its arrangement may be signifiant, given still life conventions), but the way the fruit is painted. In nonfigurative or abstract painting, where there is no obvious interpretation of the subject, there are still conventions that enable its interpretation. If painting is to be called a language, it is because, like all language, it has an underlying system of conventions that permit communication."
Steven R. Holtzman.

"Yo amo a aquel cuya alma se prodiga, y no quiere recibir agradecimiento ni devuelve nada: pues él regala siempre y no quiere conservarse a sí mismo."
Friedrich Nietzsche.

DOCUMENTS

Explicitist manifiest (1987).
Style in my painting (1987).
Sinthesys Malevitch + Magritte (1987).

IN PROCESS

Solaris Variations (2009).
Auto Pigmalion (Sine die)

LINKS

Insted of other thing.
Abstraction & Decoration.