A conversation between Arturo Castro and Girbent

(Transcript of an excerpt from an interview for Mexican TV)

Arturo Castro: In your most recent series of paintings, you have embarked on what seems to be an examination of a genre as deeply rooted in the Western pictorial tradition as the "interior with figures"...

Girbent: The dialogue with the pictorial tradition has been a constant throughout my career.

Paintings of women, same-sex couples... Are these works suggesting any claims in particular?

The references for these paintings —although mostly from the field of cinema— have been chosen for their connection to tradition and for their potential for my pictorial experimentation.

Pictorial experimentation? It seems to me that your technique is very classical…

I admit that I look for inspiration in the best, and if the best are from three centuries ago... However, behind each work there is a longing for experimentation in the sense of achieving the best possible "translation into painting" of each image.

I am struck by the words "translation into painting"...

With Borges, I believe that in translation lies one of the central issues of the aesthetic question. Borrowing or "stealing" an already aesthetically elaborated image, repeating it in another art form (i.e. translating it), and displaying it transfigured in a different context is, in my opinion, a modest but audacious, radically contemporary operation.

Do you never start from scratch in your creations?

I have renounced many of the central precepts of modernity. I prefer to work within narrow margins: my work is dominated by the drive for repetition, recreation and variation.

Interesting, but don't you think that I haven't noticed that you have avoided to answer directly to the question about the message you wish to convey with this series...

I have no special interest in fashion issues, let alone anything related to "political correctness". And for the record, I never try to work "against" anything, I simply "don't militate" against anything. There are already many artists who do that, and some of them are great. I simply choose to make my contribution elsewhere, in another sphere.

Where? In which sphere?

Well, where my interests have always been all these years: in an unending exploration of the meaning, possibilities and limits of the practice of painting in the 21st century, the Internet age (and now also of AI). I shrug off the responsibility for the message conveyed by the images on their original authors (laughs).

When you acknowledge the prior authorship of the images featured in your paintings, I understand that it is because you continue to persist in your usual modus operandi: finding files on the Internet, randomly searching for images of others that you choose because they fully capture the way you feel...

Yes... or the opposite (laughs). The part of responsibility that I take on is the part that refers to the conversion of these stolen images into something else, into images saturated with humanity.

Images that are transfigured but also decontextualised with respect to their origin...

Since Duchamp, we know that any decontextualised object is susceptible of being Art. In my case, I take out the images out of their original context, transform them into something else by virtue of the powers of painting —which always disrupts everything when it comes into play— and show them again in a different environment.

Are you talking about a kind of joint authorship?

I like to see them as painted images that become subtle palimpsests: works in which the original artist's intentions overlap with my own, so that the former's art intermingles with my own. A subtle overlapping of spirits.

So, your paintings would be complex objects, but without a specific message...

Since you are insisting, I can only tell you that I have a certain inclination for subtle and indirect messages —if there are any at all— rather than direct messages. I believe that art does not have to be didactic and useful, still less dogmatic, or to be at the service of any ideology.

I understand that you don't believe in committed art...

I focus on what I am committed to: a non-negotiable aspiration to excellence and a continuous reflection on painting as a medium in relation to a game with rules that are very different from those of modernity.

Are you saying that the challenges of today's world do not concern you and, consequently, are not reflected in your work?

At least not directly. I understand my paintings as autonomous, ontologically complex singularities functioning as the tip of an iceberg and postulating something that lies behind them, that is, a Girbent world characterised —I admit— by being little influenced by immediateness. I prefer to steer clear of today's haste. Look, I don't want to lie: I am more interested in the postulates of Spinoza's Ethics than those of Woke culture, to give you an example.

Your interests go back a long way...

My interests are many and varied (lately I am fascinated by Zabaloy's translation of Finnegans Wake byJoyce). But yes, I am guilty of being abducted by the baroque thinkers, mainly by Spinoza and Leibniz, and also by Bach's music, Velázquez' paintings...

Isn't this a strange —one might even say slightly reactionary— attitude for a contemporary artist?

If being stimulated by one of the most outstanding periods in human history in terms of art production excellence is to be reactionary, then I don't know what to say.... (laughs)

I could formulate it differently. Is your attitude towards art countercultural?

Counterculture might not be a bad option today. Paradoxes (which I love) are triggered when I think that we might be talking about counterculture with respect to originally countercultural yet currently prevailing forces.

I am not sure I am following you here. Just to clarify, could you summarise how you ultimately understand art?

I understand art as a last refuge, a realm of playfulness and lucidness in the face of the harassment of powerful inertias: from the phagocytic power of show business and banal entertainment to the tyranny of political correctness.

Galeria Pelaires has received a grant from the Consell de Mallorca to realize this exhibition.