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P. First point: how do you prefer to label or classify your work: electronic art, video art...?
R. I consider myself simply 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 electronic painting software. I go from 2D to 3D as many times as necessary for finishing the work. Although I use informatic and electronic devices I consider my work as painting, abstract painting to be exact.

P. Would you kindly describe the series of abstract videos named "The Kali Suite"?
R. 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 the painter as such. My paintings are the product of a certain violence against the illusionism but inside the illusionism. They are, in that sense, in the tradition of Magritte and Escher, although from an abstract language. On the other hand, I have always felt 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, able to subtract the mind of not visual thoughts, at least during some time.

If you permit me a parenthesis, I will tell you it is not impertinent at all to relate hypnosis and plastic arts. Hypnotic suggestion was achieved historically with the aid of visual engines like spirals rotating on its center. It sounds me to see this type of machines or very similar in some movie. Duchamp's Rotoreliefs and some kinetic and op artworks of the fifties and sixties seem to me related with these engines.

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

P. You has commented us that you consider youself proximate to Magritte and Escher as a painter. Could you contribute other reference?
R. Schopenhauer, the famous German philosopher, affirmed in the XIX century that arts in future would spread inevitably to music. At least regarding painting I think he guessed right. If there is a dominant stress in painting of XX century this is abstraction. And if painting was made abstract it was in order to be like music. However, only a brief part of XX century abstract painters became interested in time as pictorial work dimension. I refer, of course, to the denominated abstract cinema of Eggeling, Richter, Ruttmann, Fischinger, Moholy Nagy and, later, Norman MacLaren, the pioneers in this field. My painting belongs to this tradition, although my abstraction is quite different.

Time in my painting was initially an instrumental aid. I needed time because I needed the movement in order to reinforce the illusionism. The movement made more effective the bottom-figure paradoxes which I had worked since my Malevitch plus Magritte synthesis and explicitism times in 1987. This kind of dance I obtain for adding time to paradoxes offered me a lot of work chances.

Malevitch + Magritte Synthesis 01, 1987.
Oil on canvas, 43 x 66 cm.

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

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

P. The videos of this series are circular or recurrent. Have you chosen this type of temporary circular structure for any reason in particular?
R. The temporary circle relatively small, I understand it produces in public false trust to finally dominate it, what I found quite interesting. Too long cycles or very closed beginnings and finals would redound in artworks with minor capacity to catch the look. On the other hand, the idea of infinite work in time, perpetual inducements in the renaisence scientific tradition, seduces me. 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.

P. What are your plans as a videopainter for short, medium and long term?
R. Any term I aspire to be a virtuoso in the movement on picture, an authentic expert in time like pictorial component. Regarding the bottom-figure, I think I will continue deepening in paradoxes some time more. Well, each artwork is a world and this is an art at the beginning, I think.

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

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

P. Finally, I request you to satisfy the public's curiosity regarding the series title.
R. A suite is a series of musical pieces, originally dances. The suite is also a room or a group of rooms. In the hotels the suite is the deluxe dependence. And Kali is, as you know, a central figure in the Hindu religion. In the hinduist cosmogony, Kali is the motor agent of the infinite process of the world's creation and destruction. 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.

“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.

“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.”
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.

“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

“El tiempo, autor de autores."
Francis Bacon.

“Esta lenta araña arrastrándose a la luz de la luna, y esta misma luz de la luna, y tú y yo cuchicheando en el portón, cuchicheando de eternas cosas, ¿no hemos coincidido ya en el pasado? ¿Y no recurriremos otra vez en el largo camino, en ese largo tembloroso camino, no recurriremos eternamente?”
Nietzsche.

“El arte es largo y el tiempo efímero.”
Longfellow.

“Los hombres perecen porque son incapaces de unir el principio con su fin.”
Alcmeón.

“Según una teoría que la filosofía Shivaita denomina niyati (determinismo), el desarrollo del mundo, de las galaxias, de las especies o de los individuos, está regulado por ciclos [...] El primer estadio de la creación es el del espacio, el del recipiente en el cual el mundo va a poder desarrollarse y que, en el origen, no tiene ni límites ni dimensiones. El tiempo no existe todavía más que bajo una forma latente que podemos llamar la eternidad ya que no hay medida, no hay duración, no hay antes ni después.”
Javier Rouzaut.

DOCUMENTS

Explicitist manifiest (1987).
Style in my painting (1987).

LOOKING FOR FINANCIATION

Solaris Variations (2008).
Auto Pigmalion (2008)