Jorge Galindo: A Conversation With One of the Best Contemporary Spanish Painters

Mart Engelen: You are considered to be one of the best Spanish painters and praised for your unique paint handling on canvases. How would you describe your paintings?

Jorge Galindo: I see my paintings as an extension of my life. I paint, and through my paintings you can see my whole life, just like Mick Jones said about playing the guitar. The style, the genre and the subject don't matter. I have experimented with both figuration and abstraction, and my subjects have been various over the years. When you think about how to carry out a series of paintings, there is a clear intentionality. But what is interesting and fun is that you don't know what you are going to end up doing. Chance intervenes and takes you to other places and so afterwards it changes a lot from what you had initially planned. This gives you a capacity for surprise that has always been interesting for me to maintain. I have always done what is the least expected of me. I want to maintain that shockeffect. I want to surprise myself with what I’m doing. When I finish a series I have already learned how to do those paintings, so then I find it monotonous to continue doing them. Like Francis Picabia used to say, “After smoking a cigarette, I'm not interested in the butts”.