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”.

ME: And where does your inspiration come from?

JG: All the series of paintings which I have worked on have been nourished or inspired by a very particular iconography. My parents used to take me as a child to El Rastro, Madrid’s flea market. Since then, I have been an avid flea market visitor. Every time I travel, I feel the need to go to flea markets. The materials I gather are both the inspiration and the base for most of my series. Since the 90s I have used cut-outs from old magazines in my collages, which sometimes serve as preparatory drawings for some paintings, but also as autonomous works. I have needed enormous amounts of materials, ranging from old magazines to postcards or album covers. I have included it all in my work. These collages have been very important during my career. The last series of flower paintings are all based on old postcards of flowers that have worked as sketches for the paintings.

ME: Julian Schnabel had a significant impact on your artistic development. Please tell me more..

JG: Julian and I first met in 1991, thirty years ago. He was holding a workshop in Madrid at the Circulo de Bellas Artes. I was 24 then, so I attended as a student. On the second day of the master-class he asked to visit the studio of whomever was closest to the Circulo. At that time, I shared a studio nearby with many other artists, so we went to visit it. Julian saw my last paintings... read more