Inside the artists' studio: "There are days when I don't paint. I sit in a chair and think"

BarcelonaThe studios are the home par excellence of artists, the silent testimonies of their concerns and their efforts. Of the moments of euphoria for achievements and discoveries and of the frustration when the work does not meet expectations and they have to start again. Six artists represented by some of the sixteen Catalan galleries that will participate in the next edition of Arco between March 5 and 9 have opened the doors of their studios at the ARA a few weeks before the start of the fair. Each of them is a world: some make the most of every last minute to finish their work, others have already delivered the works weeks ago.

Patricia Dauder

At a fair like Arco, not all galleries present works that are brand new. In fact, some of them rebel against the imperative of novelty and exhibit previous works by their artists. It may also be the case that in the months that it takes to participate in a fair, the artist is not producing, or is not interested in producing for the fair. In the case of the artist Patrícia Dauder (Barcelona, ​​​​1973), represented by the gallery ProjecteSD, the gallery sent her works and those of other artists with whom she works to Madrid weeks ago. Instead, she has a series of spools of coloured threads on the table because she is working on a piece that will dialogue with the Islamic heritage of the Museu de la Noguera.

At Arco, Dauder will exhibit a large-format drawing made with pastel and charcoal that could be seen in the exhibition dedicated to her by the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country Artium in autumn, entitled Primal life I, and another unpublished work from the same period, both the result of her way of working, adding and removing layers, drawing and erasing, over and over again. "I'm excited when someone likes one of my works enough to want to buy it. Since I don't have a job that's trendy either, people buy my works because they like them, because they want to have them at home, and I see that they enjoy them," says Patrícia Dauder. Even so, there are works that she considers so personal that she keeps them to herself.

Patrícia Dauder has her studio in one of the characteristic artist buildings in Poblenou. She has been there since 2014, and over the years she has experienced a threatening rise in prices. She goes there almost every day, although trips to remote places around the world are also part of her creative process. “I work by sensations. I don’t sit down and think about what material I could use, but I start touching some material and then this leads me to make a series of connections with ideas,” explains Dauder. So her works are “a kind of dialogue between an early feeling and then how it develops throughout the whole process, which is quite open.”

Patrícia Dauder’s works often seem as if they are not yet finished, or as if they are falling apart. They are autobiographical in that they retain the trace of the hours she has spent working. "The two drawings I'm going to exhibit at Arco are eminently abstract, but they are related to memories or recollections I have of things that have happened to me or sensations I've had in certain places in my life or places where I've been," explains the artist. "Sometimes I have the large-format drawings hanging on the walls of the studio for quite a while, and sometimes I'm not able to do them all at once. I have to let them rest and then come back to them after a while, because there comes a time when I feel like I can't do it anymore, that I'm saturated with that image."

Marria Pratts

Entering the studio that Marria Pratts (Barcelona, ​​​​1988) has in Hospitalet is like entering a fascinating and motley place. A 250-square-meter warehouse among other industrial warehouses and workshops in which the artist seems to have experimented with materials as he does in his painting. In fact, for a time he lived in a cardboard cabin that he built with the help of the architect and artist Guillermo Santomà. It even had a bathtub and a wood stove that are still there. Pratts' training is mostly self-taught. Sometimes he has said that he would like to make increasingly larger paintings, even if he had to make a hole in the roof. He has not yet gotten there, but he continues to work with large formats. "I try to go to the studio every day, but there are days when I don't paint. I sit in a chair and just look at the paintings, and think. Or I write, listen to music or walk," says Marria Pratts, for whom the process of painting is "magical." But it is not always the case that an energy that he describes as "between magic and possession" is activated. However, he often starts painting even if he does not have a very clear idea in his head, and on other days he transfers to the canvas "some drawn ideas" that he makes while driving, traveling outside the studio.

Maria Pratts is represented by the Mayoral gallery. Last year she exhibited two paintings at Arco that reflected that she had recently become a mother. In one of these paintings it seemed that one of her characteristic characters, somewhere between naïve and expressionist, came out of another. This year she returns to the fair with Dreams, a canvas she was working on when the ARA visited, featuring eyes and a mouth that have become recurring. "The path of last year's paintings has led to a new, leafy landscape, more connected to nature. I think that being a mother and moving closer to nature makes me look at things from a new place," says Marria. "Every morning I see something as simple and wonderful as the sun rising, and every day is different!" she adds.

In recent years, Pratts has also ventured into the field of sculpture. Two years ago she presented her first sculptural ensemble at the Liceu, a sardana with three pink steel ghosts. And these last few days Pratts has spent them in a workshop in Madrid finishing a new sculpture of a ghost that she will also show at the fair, this bronze one. "It has been an incredible process and I have been able to get to know a material that I did not have in my imagination before," she says.

Xavi Bou

Photographer Xavi Bou (Barcelona, ​​​​1979) is another of the most unique Catalan creators, for how he has brought nature photography to the field of contemporary art with the Ornithographies. "I show the flight path of birds, the most complex and the most interesting ones," says Xavi Bou. "I had to invent a way of taking photos, because it cannot be done in a conventional way: I make videos, and with an algorithm I merge all the frames into one image. My work is the result of the encounter of art, science and technology. I take technology to the limit," he explains. This year he has been doing it for ten years, and what he will show at the Senda gallery stand in Arco will be a new aspect of his work, complementary to the Ornithographies, In this work, he has immortalised the three or four flaps of a bird's wings. "In this case, the important thing is the morphology and colour of the bird, and I present it at real scale," says Bou. Thus, there will be images measuring 30 x 40 cm, while the one featuring a falcon measures 2.5 x 1.5 metres. These works can be seen in a space dedicated to himself, one of the well-known Solo Projects that some of the participating galleries set up.

Xavi Bou's studio is located in the Gràcia neighbourhood, and he receives the ARA when he has already finished the work and is waiting for the photographs to be printed, of which he has some samples, and he also gives a glimpse of the creation process. All this began with a collaboration of about four months with the Catalan Institute of Ornithology. "I set up a set in the countryside, like a hallway with a black and white background. And when they released the birds, I took a bird's-eye view of the first flapping of their wings," he explains. "My work is 90% post-production. For every day in the countryside, I do ten days of post-production," says the artist, who has also collaborated with publications such as National Geographic.

Xavi Bou's interest in birds dates back to his childhood. But when the time came to choose a university career, he opted for geology. Photography came to him through night studies, when he realized that working as a geologist did not satisfy him, and for about fifteen years he dedicated himself to the post-production of fashion and advertising photography. During all this time he continued to go bird watching, until his interest in birds and his photographic knowledge came together in a project of his own. "From the beginning I had the thorn in my side of having a personal project. Conventional nature photography had never interested me, because I find it not very creative. For me it is interesting to bring new things, and I wanted to transmit my enthusiasm for nature to people who do not have it through art in an innovative way. And it has been very good," it has been very good.

Lara Fluxà

With her work, Mallorcan Lara Fluxà (Palma, 1985) has become one of the most unique artists on the Catalan scene. We are in the industrial-looking workshop that she shares with other artists in the Fase creative space in Hospitalet de Llobregat. Wearing protective gloves and goggles, Fluxà is finishing some of the sculptures that she will exhibit at the Bombon Projects gallery stand, along the lines of those she exhibited in the autumn under the title of Firefly, the English name for fireflies. These are aerial works reminiscent of electric currents. For this reason, some of the glass pieces are reminiscent of the glass insulators of high-voltage power lines, and the sculptures are mounted on metal structures or on stretched cables. "These high-voltage electrical protectors, made of glass, are able to withstand large voltage surges and maintain the integrity of an electrical system, thus preventing short circuits or electric shocks," says the artist.

Lara Fluxà's works are delicate and, at the same time, intriguing. Critics have said that her works have the character of machines, or of mutant organisms. Fluxà represented Catalonia at the 2022 Venice Art Biennale with a macro-installation through which water from a canal flowed, and with sculptures of Firefly has taken off. However, all these works share his view of problems such as the fragility of the environment, expressed in his use of materials such as tar and motor oil. "In these works, the industrial world, with cables and used motor oil, coexists with another natural and animal world; these two worlds merge and embrace each other," explains the artist. Thus, the sculptures are reminiscent of fireflies, but what constitutes them are "oils and electrical impulses."

Dioniso Escorsa

Dionís Escorsa (Tortosa, 1970) defines himself as a "vocational painter." He also explains that later he began to "dematerialize," and has made video installations, video scenes, short films and two feature films, all of them experimental in nature. Escorsa is a well-known name in the sector, but at the same time he has been removed from the art world and galleries. He is now represented by the gallery owner Rocio Santa Cruz, who will show various aspects of his work at Arco, from drawing to video installation. "Each project requires a different discipline," says Dionís Escorsa. "Sometimes I paint, sometimes I make videos, sometimes I have installations. I have even sculpted, although rarely. I have also made interactive videos... I choose each language because the project requires it, not because I want to do research on the discipline," he explains.

Escorsa has her studio in Halfhouse, a space in the Sant Martí neighbourhood, the initiative of artists Sinéad Spelman and Alberto Peral, which they have often defined as "a fusion of home and space for artistic exchange and communication". Precisely this domestic character of the space creates a curious dialogue with the two works that Escorsa has mounted, days before packing them to send them to the fair. They are two video installations, made in collaboration with the artist Alberto Merino, with which Escorsa has been deepening his research for about twenty years on "the property that light has to modify the atmosphere of what it illuminates". The first features Bell tower, a watercolour painted by his grandfather in the 1910s in Tavèrnoles. Escorsa projects an identical 3D infographic onto it, which he uses to introduce the changes in the weather into a painting. "I turn the painting into a meteorologically mutable space, a space that can be influenced by the passage of time, like the passage of light," says the artist. "Instead of making a video, the infographic is connected to the meteorological service of the plain of Vic, so the atmosphere and the weather change in real time." If it rains in Tavèrno.

With Bell tower and the other video installation that will be taken to Arco, In true wine (2003), Escorsa also proposes a reflection on how painting, photography and cinema have a transcendent character to the extent that they capture an instant, while now images emerge and disappear in "immediate consumption." In true wine, the recreation of the passage of the day inside an interior reveals a fallen glass and a wine stain on a table. "This is a vanitas and, together with the other work, it forms a kind of domestic living room, a dining room, where you see a table standing with some glasses, some chairs and a small painting, you are like in an environment and everything speaks of a cosmic sense of temporal existence," concludes the artist.

Abdelkader Benchamma

Abdelkader Benchamma (Masamet, France, 1975) is considered one of the leading names in France in the field of drawing. As a finalist in the last edition of the Marcel Duchamp Prize, he had the opportunity to exhibit at the Georges Pompidou Centre for three months. The Barcelona-based ADN was one of the first galleries to support him, and until April 19, you can see the fifth exhibition dedicated to him, an experience that has made the gallery become the artist's improvised workshop, as he finished some of the works for the exhibition, part of which will be at Arco, and on which he painted. "Sometimes I glue photographs onto the canvases, and we did it at the last minute in the gallery. We also mounted the canvases on the frames," explains Abdelkader Benchamma. His works, somewhere between abstract and figurative, have many layers: they contain classical references as much literary as artistic, elements taken from science, graphic design, comics and urban art. For Benchamma, it is "a bit stupid" to limit oneself to researching and finding references in contemporary art.

Among the works exhibited at ADN, twenty drawings stand out, which have their starting point in the Book of Comets, a 16th-century treatise in which comets are depicted in the most striking ways, such as "a cross, a burning tree, and a sword," as the artist says. "I have tried to make the Book of comets "of today, where there are drones and satellites," says the artist. The exhibition is titled From stars, and Benchamma recalls that it sounds like the word "disasters" because his works echo, even if not literally, problems such as climate change and the fears of today's world. That same idea is found in the mural he has made in the gallery, where there is a video that recalls, according to the critic Sébastien Planas, "a sick cell, with white spots proliferating like bacteria or tumors in a scanner."