Ignasi Monreal

Yeah.

I wish. I mean, I’ve never meditated in my life, that’s for one. So I don’t know how it works. I just know that the closest I’ve ever got to meditation, or what I think it would be like to meditate, is through painting. I met this guy once who was able to access that state of mind completely.

Just by will. He was like, ‘OK, now I’m going to paint’. It was like, ‘No, I’m not thinking about it. It’s just letting it go’. I thought, ‘How the fuck do you do that?’ I guess maybe he was more open and more prepared. You know, everybody has their own brain structure. I’m a Virgo at the end of the day; I’m fucking square, and I like this. But it’s a very good question, because I wish there was a way to just switch on. I’ve found it through smoking and things like this, but it doesn’t always work. Really it just comes from inside of you.

Exactly.

I find it good for brainstorming, but when you have to enter that state it’s actually the opposite, because it makes me question everything I’m doing. It makes me feel more insecure.

Yeah, I think that’s why I also find it a good kick, because it’s not something I can always get. But my feeling is that if I were to paint every day for eight hours straight, then I would be—there are people out there, I don’t know how the fuck they do it. It’s just painting all the time. And I wish I could do that.

Depends. I wake up, I have breakfast, I answer my emails and attend to my things, and then I start work. Sometimes you find inspiration and you’ll find the will to sit down and stay there for hours, and sometimes it’s impossible and you just have to do it because you have a deadline. I find it better normally at night, just because the world is sleeping, so nobody’s bothering you. I’ve found myself at a moment in my career recently where people are asking me—or not people, I guess it was myself in the end, but just finding myself in conversations where it’s like, ‘Are you an artist? Or are you a commercial artist? Are you an illustrator?’ It’s like I had to choose between doing projects for people under commission or expressing my own vision of the world. And then I came to the conclusion that I don’t want to choose. I enjoy both. And, in fact, if I were doing my own artistic expression every day for all projects, I would find it boring.

Of course. But not all of them. That’s how art history worked up until the 20th century. The artist as a fucked-up tornado of self-expression that destroys its path through creativity and who’s a genius, that’s a 20th-century notion. Before, the Vatican paid for everything.

If not the Vatican, rich families and the aristocracy were the patrons. Velázquez was painting for the king, but he was also painting people of the street in his costumbrismo. And that was his escape, his way of painting whatever the fuck he wanted. Although Velázquez is a funny one because he didn’t like painting.

Velázquez is my hero of all times.

Not only because of his incredible technique. I get goosebumps thinking about him. It’s just—he got away with murder.

Well, not murder-murder. The things he did were so outrageous, but he was so good at it that they let him do whatever he wanted. Las Meninas is the ultimate. If the king and queen had asked another artist to do a portrait and he’d painted himself painting them, that’s heresy. For one, you’re putting the audience in the place of the king and queen, which is completely unethical because they’re chosen by God, in theory. Two, you’re painting yourself at the same level as the royal family. Not only that, but there’s the dog or the infants and all the crew behind you, and he painted himself with this cross that basically meant he was part of the aristocracy. It was the ultimate ‘I’m here now’. It’s the ultimate ego trip, and it’s the masterpiece of the Prado.

Yeah.

And they were OK with it.

Any other king would have cut that guy’s head off. Also Caravaggio did that: you see Caravaggio paintings in churches, there’s one in Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, which is a triptych and it’s all about arses. The main part of the composition is a massive horse arse. I’m sure that when people saw it back in the day, they were like, ‘Wow, that’s a big arse’. But they were also like, ‘OK, well, it’s good’. Nobody said anything. And suddenly we have these masterpieces and it’s the ultimate prank. So that’s why I love these people. They were so good that they could do anything and get away with it. That’s what I strive for in my life. For instance, painting these murals now for Club Malasaña in Madrid. It’s the first time I’ve done murals in ceramics, and I’m excited.

Yes.

It’s happening. We’re focusing on tiles, but the idea isn’t just to do them for a bathroom. The tile is square, meaning that you can lift it and turn it into something modular in 3D. We want to design objects and do so many things with the tiles, and also look at this Spanish tradition of ceramics and take it from there and make it fun.
We want to mix it with technology, as we did with the Wi-Fi routers. Normally they’re hidden. So we decided to take that and put it in the centre of the house; we’re giving it the importance and the meaning it deserves.

It’s an altar to the internet. And there’s a neon light inspired by a mosque in London that I used to live in front of. It was this incredibly kitsch building all covered in tiles, and at night they would turn on these neon lights that highlighted the frame of the building.

It was all covered in tiles. The building turned out to have been a porn cinema in the ‘70s that they refurbished as a mosque. It was beautiful, and it was right in front of my house. That’s what I saw in the morning while I was working on all these Gucci things, when I wasn’t leaving my house. My connection with the outside world was through that mosque and it became—you know, it’s a mosque, it’s God, it’s religious. I would get really stoned and look at it. It was a real obsession, and this was the final thing that came from looking at that building for three years in a row.

Because I realised the same thing. I had to leave the country to realise how great we are, that only we can do certain things, and that only we can do them that good.

There is a scene. It’s very small. I think the problem with Rome is that there’s no nightlife. I find nightlife in Madrid, this new movement of light, comes from a lot of people meeting through parties. And this kind of culture is lacking in Rome. There are a lot of people who know each other; we all meet each other at the openings because it’s always the same exact cast of people. But there’s no real connection between us.

There’s not a space where we can all meet and exchange. I think it will happen eventually. There are a lot of young artists that left, and now they’re coming back. There’s going to be a revival.

I wanted the opposite of London. I was in London for five years and it was a bit too much. But I closed a chapter there. I wanted to work and to do certain things and I beat my expectations. So I was like, ‘I think now is the point to move’, and I wanted a space that was more relaxed and had a better quality of life. I didn’t want to come back to Spain yet, although I’m in-between. But in Rome I found a city that I wanted to explore calmly, and it was the first time in my life that I didn’t have a goal or an idea of what I wanted to do.

Yeah. I just arrived, like, ‘Hey’. I found Rome a very romantic place, very inspiring. Also, I thought, ‘OK, I don’t have any plans’. And then I thought, ‘Well, what did Velázquez do?’

And what did Caravaggio do? They went to Rome, and that’s where they reached their creative top, no? I was like, ‘Well, let’s try’. Why not? Nobody wants to move to Rome. And that’s why I thought it was the coolest.

I think it’s working out, for sure. I mean, it’s a beautiful place. I don’t know how long I’m going to stay. It’s more of a visit, a chapter of my life between here and Madrid.

I’m staying in a gallery space. So my gallerist in Rome, she used to live there for 30 years, and now she’s at a moment where she says she’s in the third act of her life. She wanted to stop being a bohemian, and she moved to a palace.

Yes, she has a gallery. She opened the first white cube space in Rome in the ‘80s and brought Marina Abramović, Yoko Ono, all these performance artists, and then she started this film festival of feminist art. It’s been 12 editions now. She was a visionary back then and she wanted to promote the female view in Rome, which is next-level patriarchal. And then she had this space upstairs and told me I could stay there.

Exactly. There’s this little balcony on top of the gallery and that’s where I live. So I see the gallery from my house and I see the people come and they don’t see me.

When summer comes it’s an oven and when winter comes it’s freezing, because there’s all this glass space. But it’s beautiful and it’s in a beautiful area, in Trastevere, but outside the tourist area. If you follow this one road, there’s the Palazzo Corsini and Villa Farnesina on the sides, and then you keep going and there’s the prison—the oldest prison in Rome—which used to be a convent. And then Napoleon turned it into a prison.

It’s still operating for petty crimes, and it’s incredible. I live right in front. It’s right under the Gianicolo, one of the seven hills, and at night the wives of the prisoners go up the hill and shout at them.

Either the news of the day or happy birthday or I miss you. I’m home and suddenly I hear, ‘Ti amo!’ It’s from another time. It’s amazing.

No, it’s just me and the gallery. The people from the gallery come and work in the afternoons. It’s nice to have company, because it’s such a big space.

Slowly. At the beginning I was sharing the space with a friend. He had his workshop on one side and I had my studio and my bed on the other side, all in the same space.

This guy? Yeah, but he wasn’t living there. He would just come and work during the day, and I would stay and sleep there. So at the beginning it was not a house. It was a workshop with a bed. And now eventually I’m there by myself and I’ve turned it into a proper house. It was a whole year and very unsettling just living on a bed and being surrounded by workshop stuff. But now finally it’s a nice little comfy studio, and I don’t need that much space to work because I’ll either work from an iPad or a canvas.

No, I like to switch. When I get bored with one, I like to go to the other. But beyond that, it’s not just with painting; it’s also with video and animation.

It depends on the amount of seconds you need to animate, because each second is at least 12 drawings. You can do up to 24. So 60 seconds of animation is a lot of work. For instance, with the TV show Paquita Salas I directed the whole thing. There was a team of animators and I would paint every still and do a storyboard, and then they animated it for me and put it together. It was amazing.

I think 4pm. Yeah.

The ceramic projects, which I’m very excited about. It’s a whole new universe. I mean, we’re just starting and have just done this thing for a club, which is hilarious.

Caravaggio. There you go, that’s the connection. I was like, ‘Can I manage to put a huge penis and a huge vagina on Instagram and not get it censored?’ And it worked.

We were asked, ‘Do we need to censor it?’ I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to try and see what happens’. We posted it and nothing happened. At the end of the day it’s painted. It was designed for the booths of the VIP area; you’re in a sort of private space with curtains and everything. I thought, ‘What am I going to put here? Imagine you had a huge vagina. You would have the time of your life’.

Yeah. We worked with the guy who does all the street names in Madrid and all the restoration of the tiles. This guy’s been in the business for 40 years, and he was very happy that we were two young people, and he was willing to teach us.

We’re calling it Alfar Ocho. Alfar Eight. Eight after Kobe Bryant, rest in peace.

Because my business partner is a big, big basketball fan.

Oh, I’m going to get there.