Iñaki Explains His Game of Art
“I like to talk about art as a game. How necessary is the game for human knowledge? It makes us human. Animals that play games are more intelligent and it is the same for us. As a boy I played with my father’s paints.
My relationship with painting is more a game than something to transmit my feelings. I do not like artists giving me their emotions in their work. I have enough trouble managing my own! I want their work to be an outlet for my emotions as a viewer. The way I go to my studio when working on a painting I feel as if I am taking part in a game.
We have to develop our skill for many things and open our minds to space and our surroundings. We might not understand space or care where we come from, though some might use religion or philosophy to try to answer these questions; but painting gives me the opportunity to play with those space elements.
Daniel and I are both playing with a similar idea; he from a technical point of view, trying to express the space behind and in front of the canvas. Before our work together, he was working on the imagination and what happens when we saw what is in front of us. Daniel began working on what happens when the water and the sand meet on the beach and the ripples disturb our view. We have different points of view, cultural realities and techniques. We cannot touch all the immense number of aspects of what and where we are in art. We have a way to go but if we go on playing this game, together we can discover more possibilities.
The space in my home town, Bilbao, is very industrial but in recent years many industrial buildings have disappeared with redevelopment. I often paint ruins – industrial or like the abandoned monastery. Abandoned places can give us the idea of time and I offer my idea of space.
In a gallery a painting can be like a jewel and there is a ritual of looking at paintings as precious objects. I attack, but do not destroy, that jewel as a possibility of thinking that is not something that happens only on that surface - breaking through the canvas into two and a half dimensions. The technique I use is to paint very fast, move the formation, change and attack the canvas to produce in the viewer the impression of two and a half dimensions.
It is a small reflection of what happens with pictorial and real space. A painting is only a piece of cloth with some pigment on it. It is not real but we project on to it and so we see. I change one thing and then another. I use classical language as a small break can be more effective on a classically painted piece. I paint in only black at first and put the colour in after.
Nearly all my paintings are uninhabited. When you see a human figure on a painting you are there – you identify, just as you do with the hero in a film – or you ask, what are they doing? I have painted some portraits and then the viewer questions, who is that? Many of my paintings are a game for the viewer. The piano can represent human activity or knowledge in that space. It gives the reflection and integrates more into the atmosphere than a person. Light is very important to created space. Light changes and I use invented lights, not cinematographic to make some exaggeration and contrast to reality. I use a lot of black to unify the shadows.
The train idea began with a problem I had with a teacher many years ago. He told me I need to unify my work but I painted very fast and changed my mind often. In the meantime, I came into the portico of an abandoned chapel where someone caught in a storm had drawn a locomotive on the white wall. He had drawn 20 or 30 metres of train while he had waited there. So I took a can of red oxide and made a line over 11 paintings and I drew a train on them to unify them as the train goes from one to another!”