Jorge Galindo

Spanish artist Jorge Galindo works primarily with found objects and images, which he recycles
he prefers the word: reactivates into new life. His work has been shown in galleries around
the world. In 2011 he collaborated with Julian Schnabel on a major two-person exhibition.

Steve Cox spoke to the artist, from his home in Madrid, about fascists, clowns and other things.
A recent piece of yours is a large paintbrush upon which you have written: This Machine Kills
Fascists, echoing the statement that Woody Guthrie wrote on his guitar in the 1960s. Do you think
that art can be a successful challenger to right-wing ideologies?

Woody Guthries picture is iconic. For me, brushes are my work tools, as well as being the continuation
of my body and my thought - they have been with me for my whole life and they will be with me until
the end. This vital feeling has also an ideological and iconographic sense. Painting is combative, it has to
be in order to confront realities that we dont like. We all know how insidiously evil manifests itself. Art
has a limited possibility of changing anything, but it is supreme at pointing out the enemies.

One of the pieces you made in collaboration with Santiago Sierra, Los Encargados, (2012) was a
powerful political statement of protest. Could you talk about the background to this work?

Santiago and I have known each other for a long time and we want to do something together again
soon. In 2012 we had thought of various ideas to carry out together. The final piece was Los
Encargados. It was a specific moment when people in Spain had taken to the streets and the public
squares, outraged by the devastating social cuts, which were being explained away as part of the
economic crisis. We also wanted to point to all of the former prime ministers of the Spanish democracy,
since the death of the dictator Franco, with King Juan Carlos I (Francos heir) in first place, as the ones in
charge of supporting their bosses - the national and international banks. It was our act of contra-
propaganda against the government to bring out their portraits facedown and, as an act of public
punishment, to take them for a walk, declaring them guilty, in the way that Goya might have done. We
wanted to point out the lies and the theft made by political leaders, with the King as head of the
procession. The Spanish transition into democracy was a process carried out by political elites within
Francos regime, and controlled by the CIA. The corruption is coexistent with the financial oligarchies
and the great real estate swindles that leave people homeless. This is the heritage of the so-called
model Spanish transition, lead by political parties that are really pseudo-mafia financial societies. We
performed the piece on the 15th August, very early in the morning, with the least possible traffic, in
order to film it calmly and without incidents. Right now it would ve been impossible to do it because
there is a new law in Spain, which has been brought in by the current conservative government which is
called law of public safety, which forbids acts or public exhibitions against the nation, punishable by
fines of up to 300,000 euros how democratic! Los Encargados came out nicely, also thanks to the
help and enthusiasm of Santiagos gallerist, Helga de Alvear, a German who had been settled in Madrid
for a long time. The response to Los Encargados outside of Spain has been amazing despite it being a
very Spanish-located theme. It has been exhibited in half of the world - at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin;
the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington; Istanbul Biennale; Gothenburg; Jerusalem, and Warsaw etc.
You have an enormous collection of printed source material magazines, photographs etc. which
you recycle into collages. Are you constantly collecting these? How important is the historical aspect
of these images from another era?

My photomontages have always been a parallel work to my paintings. I like the freedom and the
playfulness in both kinds of work. With the photomontages I view the old printed images as the material
equivalent to paint in paintings. And in the same way that I need a huge amount of paint while I am
painting, with the photomontages I need a huge file of pictures and old photos, printed from different
eras and different places. All these old publications, magazines, record covers etc. have a great
emotional charge for me, which reactivates itself. I like the resulting unreal images and their unreal
colours and working with them is a kind of illusionistic game and that is what painting actually is all
about.
In 2009 you staged the exhibition 'La Pintura y la Furia at Museo de Arte Contemporneo de Castilla y
Len, in which your entire studio was reconstructed in the gallery. This must have been a monumental
task?

La Pintura y la Furia was the idea of the curator of the exhibition, Rafael Doctor, who wanted to take
studio to the museum - not in a fake or artificial way. In fact, I worked there for a couple of weeks as if it
was my real studio. I also covered a room, including the floor and the ceiling, with photomontages, in a
very chaotic way in order to make it similar to the one at my house. The Painting and the Fury, to me, is
the power of Painting - a declaration of intentions, a vital attitude, the violence of emotions of painting
as the great energy. In this exhibition there were over 500 pieces as an exhibit as full and chaotic as life
itself. The title obviously alludes to Macbeths quote: Life is but a walking shadow, it is a tale told by an
idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

In 2011 you had an exhibition with Julian Schnabel at Galera Soledad Lorenzo, Madrid. How did this
come about? Were there thematic links between both artists?

In 1991, Julian came to Madrid to conduct a workshop at the Crculo de Bellas Artes. I went there as a
student. On the second day of the workshop, which was supposed to be practical, he asked to visit the
studio of some of the students. At that time I shared a studio with many other artists close by and we all
went to visit it. Julian was very interested in my new paintings, and then he started to pull out my old
work which had been stored years ago - photomontages and notebooks etc. - and from that day we
have been friends for over 20 years. He is very generous and he helped me a lot at the beginning. He
bought a lot of my paintings and photomontages to help me to start making my work full time. He even
put one of my photomontages on the cover of one of his books. I have admired his work since the first
time I saw it in Sevilles Cuartel del Carmen in 1988 - a brutal exhibition. A dramatic and compulsive
conception of Painting joins us together. In 2011, Soledad Lorenzo was closing her gallery and she asked
both of us to do an exhibition together, as a way to saying goodbye to the gallery. It was a great
experience, and a fitting tribute to Soledad Lorenzo, with whom we had worked for 20 years.

Your sculptural pieces featuring car doors and hoods, upon which you have painted, have a poetic
sensuality about them. The found object obviously has a very important place in your work what is
your fascination with these recycled objects?

Id rather use the word reactivate than recycle because thats what I do the pieces I make are
iconographically reactivated. The found object is very important in my work as I consider myself a
picture tracker. All of my work starts out from those so called waste materials which are day-to-day
objects. Cars parts are one of the most commonplace materials that you can use. Every day and every
single hour you see cars, we live with them, but by working with them you can see other things -shapes,
colours, surfaces. They are a material with a brutal and dramatic weight for painting - I have even found
blood-spattered car parts in the scrapyard.

Three years ago I did another series of paintings with another waste material - shredded Euro
banknotes, which are triturated when the notes are too damaged for circulation. It is an amazing,
emotional feeling to use this material! I did a series of huge paintings covered with chips of 5, 10, 20 and
50 euro banknotes called Money Paintings. Each big painting has near to 2 million euro notes,
shredded - you can feel the spirit of the money and the sense of thousands of people behind the
surface.

Album covers seem to have a special attraction for you - Im thinking of your magnificent Testicular
Sound Express. Can you explain this body of work?

Ive been collecting vinyls since I was a child. The record covers were my first visual artistic influence -
even before visiting a museum. I wanted to make something that had that reference. In 2010 I moved to
London and during the first year, due the impossibility of finding a good studio (something very common
in London), I started working on this series of photomontages on record covers at home. It was a big
series in quantity and small in format, made on my living rooms sofa, while watching tv. London is a
paradise for a vinyl collector and you can find massive amounts of cheap junkyard vinyls to work on.
Testicular Sound Express included nude photomontages from old porn magazines. I found that the
more I made, the more I wanted to make. At the end, the series comprised almost 3,000 pieces. The
girls from the photomontages all have telephone numbers - which is a reference to prostitutes ads
found in phone booths. The title Testicular Sound Express comes from the name that Peter Griffin
(from Family Guy) wanted to call his music band in one episode. The whole work, with its 2,900 pieces,
has a soundtrack as well, made from hundreds of two-second musical sections from each of the vinyl
records. The soundtrack is a mix of all types of music, jumbled haphazardly in a big musical collage.

Spain has produced some of the greatest painters the world has seen: Ribera; El Greco; Velzquez;
Goya; Picasso; Mir; Dal etc. Is there something in the Spanish DNA that forges this extraordinary
attribute?

Yes - but at the same time, from Goya on, they all have to leave the country. Spain is socially the country
which loathes contemporary art the most. To be Spanish and an artist is a handicap; it forces a degree of
marginality. It is a country where basic artistic education is non-existent, and that turns artists into
societys outcasts. It is bullshit.

What is your relationship with clowns?

The last thing Picasso did before dying was to paint his own face as a clown. I was struck by this story
and I set out to create a series of fictional portraits of clowns, with flowers on their faces. Clowns look so
alike and the only thing that makes a difference between them is the detail of the paint on their faces,
which is like war paint. To make these paintings I researched whether any of the artists who used to
paint by hand the great circus posters, or the murals on cinema walls during the 60-70s, were still alive.
These huge murals covered the front walls of Gran Via s movie theatres in Madrid. They used to amaze
me as a child, those gigantic paintings, exhibited on the streets, which were replaced every month. I
found one of these artists, who was retired, but the prospect of going back to paint in the same way and
using the same technique as he used to, and to paint for me, excited him. This clown series, and many
others on different themes, began by taking him some rough drawings and photomontages Id done.
The last figurative paintings I did that way were the seven ex-presidents of Los Encargados and so that
kind of traditional mural painting returned to Madrids Gran Via in another strong way, so completing
the circle and reactivating the past.