Lluís Permanyer

> Xavier Rubert de Ventós

   Excerpt from Tropos magazine

Do you intend to say something extra-pictorial?

No.

Any social message?

None.

Then, only aesthetic problems?

Yes. Composition, rhythm, organisation…

Spaces and forms.

Are white, black
and grey enough for you?

For the time being, yes.

Have you ever had the desire to do tachism?

No. Quite the opposite. I do not believe in improvisation or in the uncontrolled brushstroke.

So you deny the aesthetic value
of gesture?

In my work, yes.

In what you do, does technique command or serve?

It serves.

So do you not believe those who claim that, in a certain way, in contemporary art techniques replace representation?

For me, technique has no other function than to serve expression.

If you do not give us more technique than those who drew stick figures, what do you give us?

What I honestly can.

In all your work there is a strong concern for formal structure. Have you ever been tempted by chromatic structure?

White, black and grey are as much colours as any other. Light and shadow. Whenever on a canvas, apart from these, I have added another colour, I have always found it accessory.

Do you consider it an artistic sin, in a painting, to have an accessory element?

Yes. Because for me the problem is to reach a maximum of simplicity. I would like everything to be elementary, indispensable, essential. And everything, even the smallest element, should be justified.

Is it important for you that
a painting be intellectually justified?

As long as we have eyes, a judgement will never be solely intellectual.

In a work as “justified”, purified, essential and austere in colour as yours, could it not be lacking that touch of madness of which Stendhal spoke?

There are various kinds of madness. Beginning with the expressionist one and ending with that of repetitive divisionism. I identify more with the latter.

The kaleidoscope kind?

When painting, I never thought of the kaleidoscope.

And of crystallisations?

Neither.

So, specifically, do you not intend to represent anything from the outside world?

Only geometric forms.

But in your latest canvases you were also seeking light, atmosphere…

At first I made strictly flat forms. Afterwards I wanted to give them depth and I resorted to geometric volumes according to the laws of classical geometry. Today, without entirely renouncing them, I am already beginning to dispense with them. In composition, I think more about open spaces and what you were saying: light, atmosphere…

How many hours do you work every day?

It is half past two.
Shall we go to bed?