LIVING ART LIKE A KING
The Hotel Estela Barcelona projects an informative space of the work of one of its most illustrious guests, Josep Puigmartí
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DIARI DE VILANOVA
By Ramon Francàs | Photos: C.C.Flores
The artist Josep Puigmartí who has been creating and living in the Hotel Estela Barcelona from Sitges for 17 years, might have next to this four-star hotel a foundation with a permanent exhibition space. In the center, which would add to the space contemporary art available in the Guingueta d'Ix (Bourg-Madame), will exhibit and disseminate the work of all stages of this eccentric and prolific creator at his 78. The owners of this company known as the Art Hotel, the engineers Antonio Almazor and Francesc Castellví, plan to create the interpretive center of Puigmartí investing around 6 million euros. The initiative is intended to integrate into the local macro-project, with which Sitges projected in the previous municipal stage to become an international reference in the economics of creativity in art. The former mayor of Sitges, Jordi Baijet, says that Hotel Estela Barcelona is one of the Cau Ferrat from the XXIst century, just like the example of the house-museum of modernist Santiago Rusiñol. The former mayor believes that, in Sitges, the work of Puigmartí has gained density and maturity, placing his work among the most interesting components of the generation in the sixties, that decanted Catalan painting into modernity. Baijet sees Puigmartí as a genius. For these reasons, the former mayor pledged to convince both the Spanish Government and the Sitges Government of the goodness of a project whose main drawback soil is placed in maritime-terrestrial public domain. The space of 4,000 m2 over two floors, claims to be under the current garden area of the hotel. The project is outlined and is expected to start work within a year.
Puigmartí says that he's been working for years on the project and feels fortunate that not many artists can reach this level. Puigmartí that each day he wakes up at four in the morning to start painting without preconceptions, has converted the Estela Barcelona in his headquarters. These days looking at multiverse paints, the pearls that created the Big Bang, among which he includes humans. In his paintings there are, also, aliens. He says he lives by discovering and not wasting time copying things better than can be painted.
He defines himself as an emotional creator who does not want to think. The halls and walls of the hotel are full of his pictures, sharing the limelight with some 300 pieces by Subirachs, with a Dali sculpture, with works by Antoni Tapies or Modest Urgell or an impressive Meifren valued at €480,000.
No corner without sculptures and canvas. Even 16 of the 64 rooms have been decorated since 1993 by artists such as Antoni Xaus, Joan Iriarte, Ramon Moscardo, Grau Garriga, Subirachs or Puigmartí himself. The hotel clients and collectors can buy works. This has been a successful diversification for a hotel that closed last year with a turnover of 2.5 million euros and he saw the crisis as happened in the convention received fifty in 2009 to only four in 2010.
Of course, they deny that Estela Barcelona is an art gallery, a business that they consider to be from the nineteenth century.
Puigmartí creates his works in the same hotel or in a space of 400 meters in front of the beach of the Aiguadolç Marina, which also is owned by Estela Barcelona, sleeping on the floor next to his paintings. The owners of the hotel ensure that he can have at his disposal, in addition to their meals, the fifty employees of the company. He has 50 drivers and, if necessary, even is accompanied to the doctor, says Francesc Castellví. The hotel's owners acknowledge, in fact, that Puigmartí has an open bar and lives in the Estela Barcelona like a king. They say, however, that art is our added value, we are unique in the world. They add that the Catalan art is really appreciated outside our borders. Josep Puigmartí notes that the important thing is not where you sleep but to sleep well, and that the only difference of living in a hotel is to have the kitchen at your disposal.
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An unusual character in the Catalan plastic
Josep Puigmartí was born in Monistrol de Calders in 1932. Already at the age of 11 he held his first exhibition and since then devoted his life entirely to painting and art.
He uses and experiments with all kinds of materials. As stated in his own blog, "his great career recognized around the world, one could say that consists of several steps related to their circumstances: his great loves in different countries, who marked his work, either by a passion or by the destruction these loves caused". He has exhibited in Spain, the USA, Japan, Sweden, Denmark, France, Britain, China, Italy, Switzerland, Monaco, Shanghai ...
Josep Puigmartí, transgressive artist like few others, is a personality a bit unusual in the Catalan plastic of the second half of the twentieth century. In 1956 Puigmartí performed a work that was decanted into a schematic expressionism, giving much value to the background areas and with such thorough job figures that reminds the materic Austrian modernist painting.
In the 60's, driven by easy money and frivolous fun environments, he worked as an advertising model. He goes frequently to the parties organized by Salvador Dali and is carried away by the curiosity of the moment.
He makes his second exhibition in Barcelona and develops a work outside conceptualisms, without seeking symbols, messages and literary developments.
In 1972 Puigmartí is based in Paris and a few months later he presented his first personal exhibition "hymn to woman". Puigmartí until 1989 devoted himself to painting women.
Another tendence affecting the global art was Pop Art, especially the influence of American artists like Warhol and Tom Wesselman. In the late 60's, such acceptance had his lithographs in Japan that led him to make several trips to Tokyo where he worked tirelessly on new original models. His contact with the Silver Cloud Galleries from Pacific Beach, California, led him to move to the U.S.. This year was 1984, and resided in this country until 1989. Asia, Europe, United States ...and then back home next to the Mediterranean.
It is in the Hotel Estela Barcelona from Sitges where Puigmarti had in the 90's the most important change in his life. He gives up his wandering life and it is in the upper loft of the hotel where his studio is initially installed in 1995. The formal change takes shape in two facts: those cold and perfect lined dummies-women disappear and the line acquires the radical leadership that never had in Puigmarti's works.
The human eye had always been his great landscape. The philosophy of the eye, part memory, part observation, is his constant practice. To watch and being watched: this has been his obsession. In the 90's he developed the three-dimensional creations, sculptures or objects, called "things" by the artist. These things follow the Dadaist tradition, as well as the tradition of pop art in which objects are constructed from other objects, changing their meaning. Performs automatic acts in the selection of the items found. Now the fact that seduces him is to be devoted to his works and to be dedicated to a feverish creative activity.
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