“You have to love so that everything makes sense”

Ñaco says that as a child he was a terrible student. “The only thing I was good at was drawing”. So when he was 11 he was signed up to free drawing sessions at the school of fine arts in the afternoons. “I was fortunate in that my family always loved painting. And I was lucky to have the family of Anthony Kerrigan, a poet and translator of the Nobel Prize winner Camilo José Cela, as neighbours”.

Before devoting himself fully to painting at the age of 23, “I was hopeful of becoming a poet, and even to dedicating myself to rock & roll”. But in the end, he channelled his life towards art, giving over hours and hours to it in those early years, until he was able to break into the commercial gallery circuit.

“When I made the decision it was much more profound than I had imagined. Being an artist is nothing like starting work in a company. An artist does not retire, but lives from a spiritual enrichment that has no end, a life in which you are creating the whole time – when you cook, when you observe an object, when you walk – because everything you do ends up being revealed in your work”.

His first exhibition was in Ibiza, after which came one in the Bisart gallery in Palma, near the Gran Hotel. Later he exhibited in Altair and Astarté. “Little by little my work began to travel to the main art fairs around the world, like the one in Chicago, Arco in Madrid, Turin, Portugal or Valencia, among others”.

Two artists in particular have marked Ñaco Fabré’s career: Juan José Deudero and Ellis Jacobson. “I painted with Deudero in the summers in Portocolom. From him I learned to position myself under the sun and understand the value of nature for the artist. From Jacobson I learned how to make incursions into abstract art, closer to the expression of the soul. I remember how he used to make me paint with my right hand, even though I am left-handed, so as to have as little control as possible. It’s a contradiction, but when you go out of your comfort zone, unexpected skills appear”.

Jacobson also made him paint with his eyes closed, “to make the act of painting as authentic as possible, so that it emerged from inside me without any need for visual references. This is basic in the world of abstract geometry, where I try to show the ineffable, which I find myself unable to tell or explain any other way”, he says.

Ñaco’s art is “an emotional space for the enrichment of those who contemplate it. I find it valuable to apply all my effort to simple contemplation, because we are immersed in a maelstrom of time which imposes an unnecessarily rapid pace on us. We should try to stop and think more about where we are, what we are doing and who we are”.

The artist lives and works in the same space. “I have created a constant workplace. First and foremost, I see art as a [...]

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