Meeting with Pere Llobera
For his exhibition in Hamburg, Pere Llobera took the title from a song by Peggy Lee, “Is that all there is?” It is a song with a twist, as he noted. It develops from melancholia to burlesque. First there is the image of a house on fire, the father taking his daughter outside, she in her pajamas on the street, looking at the building in flames. Then the song changes: “If that is all there is to a fire, then it is better to dance,” she sings. The beat goes up, the swing comes in. You thought you would be crying the whole time, but no.
In Llobera’s work there is also a twist, but the unfolding goes the other way around. Or, it depends on how your eyes move through the work. I usually first see the funny side of his work, something odd, a little out of place, which creates a feeling of sympathy and curiosity. The work has a wide range of topics, and starts with the daily environment, family life, playing, musing, seeing exhibitions, and then also touches on more serious topics, a friend who passed away, the lasting presence of Franco. What the artist needs in order to make a work is a thread, a memory, an accident, a coincidence. This moment of mental electricity is essential. And if it works, it is recreated in the brain of the viewer seeing the exhibition.
After the first smile, I look more closely at what exactly is painted, and how. There are harder aspects, or more sad, or more edgy . It’s not just fun and play, it’s also melancholic, or blunt. The painting evokes a mentality or attitude more than a theme or subject matter, through a diverse combination of ingredients. What is the state of mind behind it? It is powerful, has beauty and wit, and something also that is hard to catch.
“If it was not for my humor, my wife would already have left me,” Llobera remarks lightly, on a walk through Hamburg on a sunny afternoon. A day before the opening, he took a break from installing, and I joined him. The show still keeps him busy, most of it already hung but some dots still need to be connected. There are changes he still wants to make – all this plays into our conversation. Llobera is intense as a person, but meanwhile, what he says is to the point. He is not only funny, but alert, sensitive to his surroundings and analytical about his art and the bigger context in which it appears. We talk about art history and about how certain artists have their moment, but then keep making the same work. Llobera himself is not the kind of artist to stay in a comfort zone. For him art is a realm of freedom. He likes work to be fresh.
How is being an intense person good for art? It might give Llobera ammunition and power to create. But before that, the question is if such a temperament, or illness as Llobera sometimes calls it, between brackets, really ends up in the work. Painting is a good medium to balance forces, because it has the possibility of layering, of taking things away, of adding something new the next day, of rethinking and redoing, of collaging, of creating complexity. The work develops over time and, once finished, appears as one, holding many moments together. It is, for Llobera, a good medium to stage a twist, to harmonize contradictions under one roof. In that sense, the work seems to be part of the cure, rather than the illness. A way to balance forces of life, and transform them, making things lighter. Instead of treatment, he has chosen to solve things in the studio, to be his own counselor and invoke the imaginary help of other artists whose work he admires.
In the exhibition there are several hints to death, for instance a drawing of a coffin that is balancing on a round pedestal, like a roly-poly toy, which makes it swing from left to right, and always brings it back to a vertical position. It is Franco’s coffin, the artist explains, but that is not important, he adds, and it is also not something you can see. It is a perfect example of a poetic drawing: light and heavy at once.
A day before the opening, the artist is still not sure about certain aspects. Yet what he is positive about is that he filled the modest gallery space in Hamburg with “too many works,” on purpose. There are small drawings pinned directly to the wall, there are big framed works on paper, there is a wall painting of flying chairs, and part of the gallery has been painted black. “My shows are kind of a living animal,” he says, implying that his ability to plan the result goes only till a certain point. “I have some script, in this case the Peggy Lee song, but that doesn’t mean I have a map of what is going to happen once I install the exhibition.” The song has affected the selection of works and made him decide to bring not only recent works, but also some older ones. It is the conceptual framework, while many other choices, such as about how to hang, are arbitrary. It is possible to fail, says the artist, and it is important to allow that possibility. If you excluded that as an option, it would mean that the spectator has become too important to you. That you anticipate the reaction too much. “Inside my studio I am the king,” Llobera says. “I allow myself to do all kinds of things, childish play, making copies of other artists, silly things.” Everything is possible. Then once outside, it needs to confront reality, like in the gallery while setting up the exhibition.
It is not so easy to locate Llobera on a stylistic map – or rather, it does not make much sense to look at his work through that lens. His favorite artists are not necessarily painters, but those who have a diverse output, like Mike Kelley or Francis Alÿs, for instance. They do not work in one language, or medium. And yet, Llobera himself seems to have a tight relationship with one specific medium.
Was it always clear that he wanted to be a painter? His father was an illustrator, “extremely skilled” as the artist puts it, making comics, advertisements, and other things. “Our relationship was formed through drawing. That is how we played and where we found an objective territory. Later on, when it became clear that I wanted to paint, he said: ‘Don’t illustrate, if you want to be a painter,’ which is an interesting thing to say for somebody who identified as an illustrator.”
What exactly is the difference? Paintings can contain illustration, it can be part of its content, yet if painting does not go further, it usually feels like a shortcoming. “The illustrator needs a third person,” Llobera says. ”A lot of illustrators studied at art school and they are very talented and skillful. But to start ‘the creation machine,’ they need an external impulse, a commissioner. And that is the difference with an artist, who does not need such a person from outside.” Llobera also points to the fact that in visual art, skill is not decisive like it is in illustration. In his case, one might even say that going against skill, is part of the work’s attraction and the sense of freedom it expresses.
Should one of the great artists of Spain, Francesco de Goya, be considered an illustrator? His series of etchings, Los Caprichos (published in 1799) came up during our conversation. It could be considered a critique of the society in which Goya lived. “In Los Caprichos, he uses an illustrative style, but it is not illustration at all,” Llobera argues. Goya operates more as a journalist. He was politically engaged, he managed to integrate a vision with a twist in his work. It is really special.”
Interestingly, the exhibition does not appear to be about one specific person. Through conversations with the artist, it is clear how much of the work is rooted in his everyday circumstances. But what he brings to the canvas functions as a springboard to talk about things on an interpersonal level. “I am in my paintings, but not frontally self-portrayed,” he says. In the show there is a charcoal self-portrait,and significantly, it shows only his back. It is executed in highly figurative style, and factual in details, in contrast to many other works.
In the large work Untitled (2020), a house with arms and legs attached to it, is waving and walking away. The artist made it when his gallery in Barcelona moved to a new space, and he wanted to conceive of a goodbye to a place he was attached to. In the painting, we do not see the gallery though, but Llobera’s family house. This living building is the result of different strings of stories, yet open to any other reading. In Llobera’s universe, the house is a recurrent motif; maybe it is a model for what a person is, and the different aspects it accommodates. In terms of technique, there is the clearly defined drawing of the building in sharp blue lines, against a background of salmon pink painted quickly or even sloppily. The background was painted later, as it partially covers the blue drawing, also dripping over. We see in this work how both illustration and painterly qualities are at work, and it is in their amalgam that some kind of Llobera signature becomes visible.
Multineck Guitar (2022) is a work that meets the viewer just before he leaves the exhibition. It shows a skeleton holding a guitar with six necks. The skeleton is hardly visible, because the guitar has enormous proportions. The first impression is of an impossible instrument, a cartoon-like appearance. But for Llobera it is connected to a musician he really values, Frank Zappa, and the way he performed different roles and played different kinds of music, from funk, to experimental, to classical. So there is one instrument, but many sounds. Why the guitar is held by a skeleton is for the viewer to decide, but it does not take the life out of the painting.
The exhibition presents life situations and psychological questions as they exist for many. How to live a life, which roles to identify with? Where to respond with irony or humor, and what to accept as real or inevitable? The work offers a narrative for a type of visitor who is interested in some kind of self-reflection. How to spend time with yourself, or, you might say, with your other, your alter ego, your image or career? Do you feel alive in a coffin, or more like without a house?
Before we end our conversation, the artist speaks about one more person, to say something about himself indirectly. He refers to Imre Kertesz, the Hungarian writer and Nobel prize winner, and specifically to his book The Last Refuge. In the book, Kertesz describes how he got tired of going daily to the “Imre Kertesz shop” and doing his writing work. Especially after the “luck castastrophe” of winning the Nobel Prize, Kertesz started to see the ridiculous side of his persona as a writer, and this was too much for him, Llobera recalls, leading to self-alienation. But here comes another twist – Kertesz needed to write because his body knew better than his brain. Even though it appeared absurd to him, he could not help but write and keep going. And that is a feeling that Llobera knows as an artist.
Jurriaan Benschop, 2024
