The unfinished work

“Some people think what I do is a hobby, that it’s just fun. But for me it’s quite the contrary: often I have a terrible time of it. The doubts I suffer from at times are torture and really take their toll on me. But at the same time, it is a necessity for me, and a way of life that puts food in my mouth”. The words of Javier Garló, one of the island’s most interesting, and singular, artists.

Javier rises early, at 6.30 am. From then on, and until night falls again, his head functions and is swept along with the thoughts of the moment, which he expresses in his artworks. He likes to work sitting down on the floor, listening to music. And he also likes unfinished works. “Sometimes I regret having continued with a piece, and see it as too ‘finished’. It has been hard for me to reach that point of saying ‘I’m satisfied with it like this’ and leave it at that moment”.

Javier started painting by accident. At first he did graffiti, because his group, SDP, would meet up to paint, sing or dance, but he was only really drawn to the first of these three things. His friend Marco Antonio taught him this artform, Herminia guided him throughout the process, and Carmen and Floren ultimately polished it for him. “I thought I knew how to work, but they showed me how closed in my world I was, and that I still needed to acquire a lot of basic training such as depth, ratios, colours, proportions…”.

As he grew in his art, the jobs he did were many and varied: space theming, 3D designs, painter in a workshop where objects were repaired with putties and fibres, driving his father’s taxi for eight summers…

Javier’s work is full of symbols, “I am a little obsessed with that”, he confesses. “I think a lot about the meaning things can take on. And sometimes they are things I believe, but other times I base myself on universal symbols. Take the horse, for example. At first, it’s like the toy you played with as a child, but as you grow up it becomes something harsher, as it is no longer that little horse you played with when you were small”.

When he creates, he likes to research all types of materials: cardboard boxes, car doors, ping pong balls, tracing paper, glass… “For example, a table tennis bat marks the format and you have to adapt to that – it’s the perfect excuse for trying out new materials and finding out how they work”, he explains.

With colours, however, he does not like to experiment. “I have a great deal of respect for colour, because I am scared of doing things I know I won’t like. I think there are a lot of people who don’t know how to use it, and it has become a very facile tool to sell”. For his drawing, Javier mainly uses charcoal and graphite.

In the hundreds of sketches he produces, dotted around different parts of his studio, Javier feels “freer and more comfortable” than painting on a large canvas. “I realise that the sketches don’t have the same presence as a canvas, but I love working on tracing paper, that’s where my true essence lies, and the idea, the imagination”.

Javier Garló would have liked to live in a different age – he doesn’t yet know which one. For him, the 21^st century is “torture”; he feels there has been a loss of propriety, affection and attention towards many things, not only art.

And he is probably not the only one who feels that way.