Frederic Amat: "I painted with the sound of Jordi Savall's viola da gamba inside me."

BarcelonaThe artist Frederic Amat He settled in Vallvidrera in the late 80s. He renovated two houses with the help of architect friends to create his home and studio, and over the years he has turned them almost into a work of art: the house has, on one of the facades, some deformed pots like the ones in the mural he did for the Mercat de les Flors, for the Teatro del Matadero in Lleida. The property is on a slope and, below it all, among fig and pine trees, there are some of the gigantic chrysalides which he exhibited at La Pedrera in 2017.

The forcefulness of these monumental works is overwhelming. Within these walls, Amat also creates his most delicate works, such as the audiovisual installation The sound and the ink, the result of collaboration with the musician Jordi Savall. This is a work that will be unveiled at the former Hospital of Santa Magdalena in Montblanc during the next edition of the Jordi Savall Festival (from August 11 to 17). "I have always paid special attention to music and poetry. The dear poet and friend Octavio Paz said that music, poetry, and painting are like the Holy Trinity: they are three different arts but they have only one truth. And Joan Miró said he wanted to make a painting that was like a musical score written by a poet. of abstraction," explains the artist.

Amat had the idea of making The sound and the ink twelve years ago, and has now been able to make it a reality thanks to the co-production of the Jordi Savall Festival and the La Caixa Foundation, with the collaboration of the Festival Musique & Histoire de Fontfreda, since the recording of the artistic and musical action was made in the infirmary of Fontfreda Abbey on July 16 of this year. "First of all, this work arose from admiration, because I have been following Savall for years," explains Amat. The installation is made up of five square screens measuring 2 x 2 meters displayed in dim light where you can see, randomly, how Amat paints to the rhythm of five musical pieces performed by Savall with two of his musicians.

Most of the musical pieces are from the 15th century: the anonymous Basque lullaby Aurtxo txikia negarrez, which Savall discovered in Amat with the voice of his wife, the late soprano Montserrat Figueras; the also anonymous Canaries, with improvisation sections; and madness From the life of that world. The repertoire includes another madness, by Rodrigo Martínez, and Romanesque, by Diego Ortiz. "I've been preparing for twelve years," says Amat. And when the recording date was set, he rehearsed for a month and a half with two assistants, Roc del Río and Albert Porta. The goal was to work together and adjust the speed with which one of them moved the transparent paper on which Amat had to paint while the other gave him the different utensils he used, including bones and gloves with flakes of hair sewn onto the fingertips. "I couldn't improvise; it's extremely dangerous. I couldn't be involved in everything, because I've painted those songs with bones, with hair, with my hands, with my body... Each song evokes a specific response in me, and that's why you have to be prepared. I worked at a table with a video camera underneath," he adds. "It would choke me, it would break me; and if it stopped, I also had to have two extremely prepared assistants."

Making "blind drawings" during concerts

Amat has an intense career in the field of music: he has directed the operas Oedipus Rex and The Journey to Simorgh. And on a very intimate level, during concerts he makes "blind drawings," that is, while the music is playing he enjoys it in very small notebooks, without looking at the paper. "It's the way I digest the concert, to acquire a deep understanding. Otherwise, I suffer a kind of indigestion, an excess. The notebooks for an opera by Verdi, a Wagner, or a concerto by Bach or Stockhausen are totally different from each other." Amat assures that without all this experience he would not have been able to embark with Savall on Sound and ink. "We hadn't prepared it together, and we did it in the ideal territory in which to forge dialogue, which is trust. For my part, trust and admiration, and for his, he loves her. And that trust made everything flow. I painted with the sound of Savall's viola da gamba inside."

The result, even watching the videos on a computer screen, is hypnotic. "You feel the viola da gamba and it has the tone of a human voice. I no longer thought about the materials; it was like riding a bicycle, when you learn you forget. And you have absolute freedom because you've gone to fetch water at the bottom of the well," says Amat. While the first piece ends with references to infinity, in the part of the canaries The hair sweeps across the screen creating a thousand and one figures that barely last a second, and in the follies a faun appears, because originally these compositions were songs of shepherds "who went into ecstasy," explains Amat. "In the dances of the shepherds that they called follies there were some ostinatos that invited variation and improvisation. For me, it was fantastic, because I already knew the piece and saw how Maestro Savall was going, and that made me ride the ink even more. I've always been envious of jazz ensembles, and in the end, I was able to do the same through ink."