Javier Paricio interviews Carlos Cortes, a Spanish artist whose work encompasses painting, installations, dance, performance and theatre design. He is currently based in London. His new exhibition “OUT OF PARADISE” at the GX Gallery, Camberwell runs from 9-21 February.
JP: Your practice covers a number of artistic disciplines. This may come as a surprise for those who are only familiar with your paintings, or I imagine that equally for others who only know your work in dance and performance. How do you explain this dichotomy?
CC: I trained initially as a dancer and as a linguist, in Spain, and only later in life did I come to London to do a Master in Theatre Design. But I’ve always been working across a range of projects that respond to different needs and contexts. I think I could never find a training that was suitable for all my cultural interests, and it was only by putting together bits of my experiences in different fields that I could finally develop a practice that reflects who I really am.
I always say that if something you need or want is not out there, you’ll have to go and create it yourself!
JP: What is the connection, the common denominator between all your different projects?
CC:
I’m very interested in the role of the artist as a catalyst, or you could even say that as a shaman. I think that artists have to help people connect with people, we are bound to create experiences that change people’s lives, or help them to look at things in a different way.
A lot of my work deals with trying to trace other people’s activities, or to offer them the opportunity to interact, to participate. I believe we are all connected in one way or another, and sometimes it’s just a matter of sitting quietly and “listening” to what ‘s happening around us, and all the connections begin to unfold before our eyes…
JP: You say in your own words that in Visual Art you always work with recycled materials and found objects. Why is that?
CC: I like to paint or work with objects that have been previously part of other people’s lives. Things that have been worn down by the way they have been utilized: broken tools, parts of machinery…It seems to me that when I do that I’m tapping into “embedded memories”. Because of my work in dance and performance I also see this as a kind of “live choreography”, since those objects have been affected by the traces left by other people’s actions and movements…
JP: Has there been any changes in your work in recent years?
CC: Well, I have worked for more than twenty years using my left hand as a main source for my drawings. It is a way of reaching the unconscious and of liberating my imagination. So the characters I depict in my work are all imagined by me. But I have lately begun to include real people – many of them are my friends- in my paintings, and therefore using my right hand (I’m normally right-handed).
JP: There is a new installation coming up in this exhibition that is a departure from previous projects. Is it the first time you blow up a car as part of an Art Project?
CC: Yes, that’s something I’ve never tried before…
JP: Could you tell us a little bit more about it? Why, and what’s the meaning of it?
CC: The international political situation in the Middle East and terrorist attacks have become part of our daily life. Car bombs are in the news every day. So one day I decided to put a “car bomb” in an Art Gallery.
JP: What do you mean by that?
CC: I’ve always loved explosions, crashes, stuff that happens very suddenly but that is so strong that it completely transforms the shape of things. We go back to the idea of choreography.
Twisted metal after an explosion is somehow a form of frozen choreography, where enormous forces have left very clear traces of their energy.
By replicating the effect of terrorist explosions we read about everyday in the newspapers, something new could be explored. I wanted people to look at the amount of damage that a car bomb can cause and think about why this is happening all the time. So we blew up a car, we gathered the pieces, and we took it to the gallery to become part of my next show.
JP: What are your future projects?
CC: I have two international exhibitions coming up next year, one in Zaragoza, (Spain) coinciding with the EXPO 2008, an international exhibition where more than 100 countries will be represented. The other show will take place in Holland, where I was invited last year for a performance festival. I would also like to develop one of my theatre projects somewhere in this city. I’m very interested in the dialogue between architecture, landscape and performance, and having lived in South London for the last ten years of my life there are a few places that really inspire me to do a site-specific piece.
See Carlos Cortes’ work at his new exhibition: “OUT OF PARADISE” at the GX Gallery, Camberwell runs from 9-21 February.
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