Sebastià Alzamora - website of the artist CRESPI I ALEMANY

Guillem Crespí, the instrument of the fruit

By Sebastià Alzamora

As things are going to the world of art is not just a pun to say that Crespí Guillem is not an artist painter, but is an artist and, even then, painter: Guillem Crespí cree in painting, trusts, and sees and understands reality, the world, in pictorial terms, as if each of the pieces that make up this world-including himself-were stains and traces of a large painting by who knows if God himself.

There is something deeply horaciana in Crespí Guillem, who is seen even in the physical presence of the painter. Crespí is loud and clear, is the big hand and fits with the energy of its partner, and meanwhile it looks in the eyes, without hesitation but without the slightest sign of intimidation: I mean that has a noble ademán, which seems to appeal a tradition, a alcurnia, but times are overdue for more Lozano. Guillem Crespí suggests a man from another time, perhaps a very long fall: who knows if it makes us think about someone like the poet Horace. This feeling is accentuated when the painter spoke: it does so with an accent rude, labrador Santa Margarita, while his words are those of a man worship, which expresses an orderly, with clarity and without trace of wantonness. Yes, probably Horacio should also speak well, or the like.

Furthermore, we must bear in mind that the poet Venusino also loved the land and nature, and they found reasons for inspiration for his poetry. In a television interview devoted to Crespí Guillem, and he has left me in order to prepare these notes, it appears, as is mandatory in such programmes, the artist in his studio and in its immediate environment of work, which, in If our man, can not be other than his native village of Santa Margarita. We see it walk through the countryside, and himself, off camera or looking at this, explains that, in nature, everything wakes every morning, and we need to walk carefully so as not to spoil. Speaking of dancing tomatoes, or appears to move as the vegetable agree with the position of the sun, as well as of nature, by itself, is manifested in forms,volumes, strokes and ways that are clearly artistic pictorial. We see it take a handful of soil covering the roots of a carob tree or an oak, is about to face and then assert that the earth and roots wet by rain, touched and smelled, felt and incorporated, to help creation process. He says he sees traces of this matter, organic, in the work of painters who likes, as Frederic Amat, Riera Ferrari, Lluís Leon or Joan Bennàssar, all of whom, like himself, artists and even then painters, who have faith in the painting and are taken for obtaining any iota of truth, any glimmer of light over the mass that is earthy life.

Surrounded by olive trees and walls MARES, comes to saying that art has no mystery as both wanted to assume, and declares that a child can do: in case anyone doubted, after a little while we see a painting company his son, who is the same Guillem Crespí in small, and it also draws. After work, the boy was about his father and teaches him the result: “I think that is fine,” the judgement artist, inevitably proud. And, to explain the picture just made, the child spells without realizing a whole conception of art that synthesizes the poetics of Guillem Crespí, as if between father and son had a deep and unspoken: “Here I have drawn a chair, and the name, and he also painted, and is already “.

In this “and you’re” is summed up everything that can tell an artist about his work coup and has since closed. There will be those who find that the end is naïf, but on the contrary, touch and smell of damp earth, dancing to the beat of tomatoes which marks the sun, the act of drawing an object, paint, put the name and you’re all this together, exudes the simple complexity of art practiced since freedom, cleanliness and honesty. Nothing easy.

The work of Guillem Crespí includes a good bulk of works with fruit reasons: there is a predilection for the pumpkins, but we can also find watermelons, lemons, slices of melon, and other gifts from the earth. After painted rocking chairs, as it has in its study, and these works are authentic and valuable studies on the provision of space and harmony of bodies inside the light and air. And lately, his paintings are musical instruments, with a predominance of the strings (violas, violins, bass, piano), but also to accommodate the winds: an oboe or bassoon, a horn, a tuba, a trumpet. Strings and winds, the air always present within boxes Guillem Crespí: but now, as suggested by the presence of instruments, capable of pulsation, vibration, life. We never know-it-Guillem Crespí, but the air is always one of the major themes, nor is that of latent form, any work of art: in the end, the air is the matter with the facts that are dreams, and, hence, the substance of ourselves, as Shakespeare said he left for the moral instruction of all men. In short, thematic tour of the work of Guillem Crespí ranging from fruit to the instrument: or, put another way, from nature to culture, what is primary to the artifice, but the two ends are excluded, but , On the contrary, they complement one another and multiply their meaning.

Many centuries before Shakespeare had not either born, Horacio-which certainly should resemble Guillem Crespí-coined another famous judgement: ut pictura poiesis, wrote the poet, that is: as well as painting, poetry. At the time, Horacio referred to the need, both in art as in the other, to maintain order, the proportions and good measures, which will always be those that correspond most closely to those of nature, which was referred to by the poet always within the parameters of locus amoenus. Well, from that standpoint, Crespí can subscribe without the anguish of the classic dictum, how can we check when he explains his creative process: first and foremost above the material and still virgin with a clear idea in his head about what they want painting, the artist works the composition and structure of the table (that is, as fit objects), then comes the definition of color (ie as giving life). The color, composed from a mixture of acrylic resin and pigment, then, if the result taking shape, you can add water, white spain or pulp; finally, the whole mixture with the help of a drill that takes applied a kind of shovel. He did not say more, sometimes Crespí paint using an old staircase collection figs as an easel: always thus contact with the ground, with the ancestral component or telúrico. Looking again at the television camera, the painter explains that his paintings are always composed of many layers of color, applied on top of each other, with patience and care, to obtain the desired result: There is, therefore, an objective, a place to which they want to go with each of the tables. It also recognizes that, like any artist, he also feels the need to evolve, innovate, and that for this purpose is served by the reliefs i transparencies. However, but that the starting point is always the same and clear: “Everything must be built in line,” says Crespí like someone who says nothing, “first one thing after another, but you can not leave any element side, everything has to go at once. “ With the experience counted thus: or, if you will, common sense applied hobbies without a field so slippery and full of uncertainties such as the artistic creation.

Definitely, not costs us imagine that Horace would have passed with a smile equidistant to this way of working, thus producing paint or produce poetry, ultimately: to produce beauty.

However, the judgement horaciana ut pictura poiesis contains, as of today, other possible readings, beyond the original intentions of its author. This is true at least since Baudelaire, who included at the beginning of The flowers of evil, a poem entitled Correspondences”, which expresses one of the foundations of aesthetic discourse of modernity: the possible transits between different artistic languages. Allow me to recall here the text in translation by Xavier Benguerel:


Nature is a temple where everything from living pillars

sometimes let out a few words that do not discerns;

man passes through a forest of allegories

observed that the eyes of glances with family members.

As echoes that confuse a long distance

within a dark and deep unit,

so vast as night and clarity,

among smells, sounds, colors, is set accordingly.

Some scents are like tender beef and children,

sweet as oboes, green meadows as inefables,

- Other, corrupt, rich and triumphant,

to expand as things enduring,

and amber, musk, incense and benjuí,

that the senses and the soul to sing frenzy.

The poem, obviously, is rooted in the conceptual Platonism, so that is not hard to think of the correlation or communicating vessels that are established between the World of Ideas and the World of Shadows, according to the myth of the cave Or, in Christian terminology, between Heaven and Earth. Also, a staircase more strictly earthly, may refer to the matches or affinities that occur between the five senses with which we perceive the world and, hence, allow us to obtain knowledge: references, explicit or evenings, in sight, taste, touch, hearing and smell are constant and, somehow, make up a thread of argument that contributes to sustaining the poem. But, of course, the poem is clearly legible from the perspective of art and aesthetics: whether there are correspondences that are manifested through the “living pillars of nature” (démonos mind that the nature, and as for Horace to Guillem Crespí , Is also Baudelaire for the big question to which art and poetry must respond, beginning with its ability to create and recreate: the fact that we are in a poem that opens modernity consists not far from the cancellation of the major issues that concern the human condition, but the opening of a new perspective to tackle), and affecting the relationship between the different orders of existence and between different modes of what humans have to perceive reality, it’s easy also understand that should take place between the muses, that is, between different artistic languages, which in the end are nothing other than instruments for filing, represent, modeling, or challenging nature. Ut pictura, poiesis, said Horacio; Charles Baudelaire, twenty centuries later, insists the same idea, extending it to all the arts and the entire Cosmos.

In fact, if the Latin poet established connections between painting and poetry, symbolism modulation of late romanticism and Baudelaire which is a mainstay, though paradoxically not declare never symbolist-something moves to the axis of parallelism and becomes obsessed to seek a meeting point between poetry and music. Thus, an illustrious contemporary Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, opened his poem Art poétique (horaciana full title, incidentally) with a declaration of principles: De la musique avant toute chose, namely the music ahead of everything. Indeed, simbolistas saw in the music of the highest artistic disciplines, as it has a completely pure language, that is not known or contaminated by switching to another body other than the expression of the same music. The verbal language, however, that is for poetry, represents for them exactly the opposite: the poet was forced to express the abstract and the ineffable-that as a good romantic late, was pursuing the simbolistas - using a code necessarily adapted to the convention and realizing - as vulgar, in his opinion-daily, as is now the words of the tribe. The same words that were used to communicate an order to carpenter should also serve to express (etymologically, get out) the so-called inner world of the poet. Faced with this contradiction, the symbols were not turned anything other than give a musical treatment to verbal language, regardless of the value of conventional words and much response to his first resonance: naturally solved, but the poems were guilty of a eufonía Undoubtedly, the same as Verlaine. The travesty of this approach came a few decades later with his illustrious dadaístas and hooliganism of phonetic poetry, which even today some grow as the rien-va-plus of transgression, inadvertently (or power) realize that this is a joke with a historical value and more than centenary.

But let this be, that would be subject to another text. In any case, should not laugh a lot of friends simbolistas, because at heart, with its curolla by the musicality of language, did nothing more than point to a crucial issue in the construction of any work of art, come from discipline to come, as is the rhythm: the rhythm because, as Plato discoveredagain- without him as of today nobody has found to contradict arguments, is nothing more than order in time. We will not be us who will not put any objections to Plato, so that, making a case, we arrive effortlessly to the premise that artistic creation should have to do necessarily with the task of putting order in time: namely, with the committed to educate what is abstract, submit to some sort of realization, in short, with the establishment of some sort of convention. The artsthat we have become accustomed to contemplate in terms of transgression and break-is at the bottom, and before anything else, a convention that defies the reality of disorder, and looks to do something useful, in whatever manner profitable for us humans, for as long as we are-speak with the teacher Ausiàs March-in this strange place that is the world concrete and visible.

As I write these words, I have before me a picture of Guillem Crespí I gave her generosity long before knowing what I would write about his painting: that there is still such sequence, this capability of detachment, this lack of suspicion by someone who advocates the efforts of many to a life of ingratitude art is something that, for rare and deserving of gratitude, I am also pleased to leave here appropriated.

The table represents two violins, lying belly up side by side: the masts of the sides of a color are alive and ochre earth, and the surface of the box, a blue nuanced, stained, which evokes the grey areas that offer static sea on a day that awakens with a clear and sunny sky after a night of wind and rain. Edges of violins and almost seem to float above a substance dissolved vague, referring exempt from certain, composed of spots that combine the same blue instruments with reliefs and other spots of ochre hues, yellow, grey, light blue, lilac: space that could resemble that of our dreams, if we had the power to govern our dreams to make concrete. At lower right turn, highlights a sort of bump or bulge that might suggest the silhouette of another musical instrument, who knows if percussion, or rather a bulb that we could refer to a pumpkin, or sweet potato: in the end The presence of fruits and vegetables, as we have said, no one can ever challenge in boxes Guillem Crespí. And yet, at the upper left, face the eyes with a silhouette just outlined but prefers top, as if to search for a sip of air: Does the head of a fish, a bird or a reptile ? We do not have, in fact, no need to know exactly: there is already sufficient, should be enough, with the perception of order that imposes the table in time to dedicate to your contemplation.

As in that movie scared Hitchcock, I look at the table and begin to arrive evocations: the parallel lines that are drawn on both sides of the two violins juxtaposed suggest something else, who knows if in some tomateras lined by Cane Framework that maintains, and then alongside the tomateras, a human figure, the silhouette against a light of a man that sulfate and that could well be my father behind him, acongojado, can be found, to which he has forbidden to enter the small garden for fear that the spoilage of four footprints, but the animal, true, remains two steps behind the master, hoping perhaps that he convey any indication. The sun scattered light of evening of June over the stones that make up the dry wall that closes the garden, and this wall was erected by the hands of my father’s father, and myself, on one occasion my golden-ay the already-distant childhood, my grandfather had helped in repairing a piece of this wall that had collapsed because of a summer rain.

Now resonate distant thunder announcing the early arrival of the storm, cats running to hide inside the stall and groans can masculla restless and around the booth, and another look once inside the bucket of food without dare to stick the nose : And that is inside the food has fallen a lizard that moves, and that it can produce the ascos. The storm is becoming increasingly close, confirms the ventolera that rises suddenly and despeina hair from my mother, who is close to the tank of poultry: wants to draw water to start cooking Arrosa brut, now twelve, we eat and, if not espabilamos, not to feel bad hour. Within the broth containing the clay pot floating species, rice, beans and artichoke hearts, small pieces of bacon, a couple of the ocellons tordos-grandfather had caught the previous day, or fifty years ago, with barbed wire-or for a crowd of peas, the presence of almost imperceptible onion about to melt, like tomatoes.

And these are well-cooked tomatoes that now were those who danced in the garden to the sound that gave them the sun in the morning, midday sun, the sun sunset, the sun that I love my children and I heats in adulthood, the sun to re-emerge with more clarity after the storm that is approaching right now

or extensive damage was done? - the same sun but never repeated that meets and arouses the fate

of the living and the dead, like a good dance beat, a dance that requires well-tuned instruments-strings, preferably some hands-and that the sound carefully and vigorously, decisively. (Now that I think, spoke of a table where they are two violins, and now I’m still in a sketch of disorderly horaciana stamp).

Such is the power, the ab ility to paint evocative Guillem Crespí. In front of his paintings is easier, and therefore the most desirable, is let go, you will be allowed to carry the rhythm, cadence leading printed unequivocally: Do you think that the strict manner of painting Guillem Crespí (first The composition, structure, then color, then the figures, and is now) was to whim or routine? This is rhythm, this is order in time, this corridors are open for any matches that can illuminate our intelligence, curves and hiding our brains. Dejan because the pace you take, you swing, you turn your way and you will be carried inwards, back in the direction of anyone who have buried inside the head or inside the heart or in any other viscera , Which connect the memories including unsuspected establish relations between them, multiplying the knowledge that we do not know they possess, acudiéndoos perhaps from the black apretadot of Shadows some glimmer, some bright ideas of intuition. This is Nature, this is the way we have to fulfil our human nature: I think, and, hence, exist.

Then comes culture, is clear: this, ranging from Nature to culture, is one of the key matches, which allows us to transcend the particular and concrete things to the general aspects. Afirmaba Joan Fuster, the Swedish, that culture was always a matter of correcting and improving, and we would say that either has no reason. Correct and increase: this is the culture. To abandon the pace is not enough, of course: we need the cadence, the tone and, above all, correction. Guillem Crespí must be a steady man, tenacious, patient, because obviously he has learned the hardest lesson of art, more bad undertaking, which is the lesson of the error. The painting Guillem Crespí transmitting the comfortable feeling of not wrong, just because the painter must have mistaken many times: only learns to circumvent the error to force incurring many times as required, without falter knowing that the error is always there, waiting to anywhere in the creative process. Another match: in relation to the error, the scenario is like the poem, or as the score: on any element that can ruin or missing hours, days, weeks of work. When this happens, the bad artist, or the wrong artist, the imposter, ultimately, it falls prey to despair and desolation, the artist worthy of the name, however, corrected. Fixes and learn. Fixes and hopes. Fixes and improvements: as the athlete learns to measure their strength, improve balance, muscle tension and make the best performance, dosing speed and momentum, until the time comes, in the eyes of those who look, it seems natural that is the product of effort, and also the artist, to force mistakes and come back later, gets to appear as a natural fact that is a device developed at length. The correction is the mother of all artistic adventures, the bare minimum, the price paid in advance.

Guillem Crespí what should have paid by far and with this generosity that is characteristic: and that is why his paintings are so good, why we like to watch them, why are valid and beautiful, and questioning our memory, which is a reflection of our status, our human nature and stature. This is the result of the correction, the indefatigable exercise, essential for the correction. This one hand. On the other there is an increase, the clarification offered by the artist, by virtue of their work, respect the world in which the term carries.

In other words (and prejudice against decadence that defends the perfect futility of art) after the artist has done his work, the world must be more comprehensive as it was: has been increased, therefore, we must have the certainty that if the work suddenly disappear, miss, that the world would be less than that is if he has the presence of the work. Some say this say better world, but I’m not too sure that the world as such is perfectible or improved, nor would hand in the fire that could worsen: these gradations-linear as the idea of progress, example-I are always little reliable. From what I have no doubt, however, is the fact costata that men can improve the world, do bigger, and that this can be done so that our status as creatures of culture, we are capable of correcting and increase.

His spiritual Canto, the poet Joan Maragall is directed to God-the order of ideas, therefore-and it implores with those famous lyrics: “Man is sound and my human measure / around how much might believe and hope: / if my faith and my hope here is covered, / How I will make a culprit in the hereafter? “. And to finish, that clamor of love for life, love for this world: “Be a higher birth death!” This is a wonderful way of expressing the idea of growth, the possibility that our area of the Shadows, not only being able to communicate through allegories, as described Baudelaire-with the ideas, but that may contain: this must breathe the artwork, to wear with the second skin of idea reality of which party the artwork. From this elevation the transcendentitas tell, we prefer to say growth, but in the end it is the same: based paint rocking chairs, end up seeing the rocking chair, to force draw pumpkins arrive to receive the pumpkin; if we do not tire of painting tools It must be possible that we listen to music. Each box Crespí Guillem is a good step towards the idea, the more humble and casual is the subject that inspires, just being the highest reverberation that emerge. Each box Guillem Crespí, hence, is a contribution, an increase, and when we look at what we sobreviene safety that without this table, once painted, the world would be more incomplete. This has enabledthe route to which we referred at the beginning of the fruit to the instrument, the nature and culture.

In contrast, because the trajectory, to be consistent and so good, must be reversible: knowledge, the crumb of truth sought by the work of Guillem Crespí, you get going from the bottom up and from top to bottom, as we say in Majorca, there’s so much here and here to there. If simbolistas seeking to write his poems as if they were pieces of music, for that to build a language itself and not contaminated for poetry, our painter has chosen to incorporate music to his compositions: the dance of tomatoes, two violins floating on a magma indistinct. There are boxes Guillem Crespí realities autonomous perfect, although born of theobservation of the natural reality and imminent.

But contain a logical, organized a world, imposing order in time. Faith in the paint, faith in the effort, faith in nature, without correction truce: artist, and even then, painter. And repeat the task over and over again until closer to a presentiment of light, any sign of truth. Correction and increasing specificity and evocation. Dulce et utile, as wanted Horacio, who also loved poetry and pumpkins.