Álvaro Castagnet on Error, Passion, and Painting in the Age of Images

This conversation with Álvaro Castagnet, the internationally renowned Uruguayan watercolourist, was recorded remotely in May 2020. Its axis is not technique: it is the human in art. Error as the raw material of beauty, innocence against protocol, and painting as an answer to an age drowning in images. It is published as an edited dialogue.

The interviewee’s opinions are his own; the Conversations section does not imply doctrinal agreement.

To Capture and to Construct

Jimmy: You reduce reality — complex, three-dimensional — to a plane with a few strokes, and manage to reveal more than reality itself. Does the photographer capture and the painter construct, or do the two converge?

Álvaro: For me it is a mixture of the two. There is a great likeness between photography and painting: when you want to take a good photograph, the atmosphere reaches you; you are analysing the composition, the forms, the light. The mechanical part — what my hands do — the camera does for you. But the rest, which is the very marrow of all this, is your observation, your spirit, who you are. The great risk of figurative painting is arriving, unconsciously, at an illustration that resembles a cold photograph. If I illustrate the street I am looking at, I am making a photograph — and that, as far as art itself is concerned, has no value. What I do must carry a dominant charge of emotion, of feeling. If there is one thing I do not want in my painting, it is a merely photogenic value. It must transcend the photograph, transcend the illustration, transcend the obvious.

Error and Passion

Jimmy: There is an experiment with music: computer-generated music — perfect, without a single error — is set against the same music performed by a great musician, where minute errors are detected in how the finger lands, in how the string vibrates. Faced with the choice, almost all prefer the music played by the human being. The reason, they say, lies in those small errors, in the lack of perfection. You often speak of that connection with the errors generated in the process of painting.

Álvaro: Surely the most successful is the one with slight imperfections. Painting is an accumulation of imperfections. When you are painting you are as if on fire: the painter is steeped in that passion, which generates a very violent approach to the painting. In that maelstrom, errors are made. And the artist’s great virtue is to press on, to reconcile all those errors and transform them into something wholly unexpected, supremely creative, full of beauty.

Jimmy: It is like placing chance inside the process.

Álvaro: Entirely. And steered by passion and the heart.

Innocence Against Protocol

Álvaro: The mind and the intellectual part should not be the standard of measure. Being intelligent is a fine thing, but when one is governed purely and exclusively by the intellect, that is not prized in art, because art is innocence: it is entering a world where one dances freely. Society moves under a certain protocol, accepted by all. In art you do not move under that protocol: the moment you move under society’s protocol, you cease to be a creator. The artist is an individual; art is individuality. That is why they so often call us bohemians. Art is, in part, what you do not know and no one knows: it is like walking in a jungle where the path has not been made beforehand by another, cutting the branches as you go, trying to discover something.

Jimmy: A rebel, then.

Álvaro: I do not say it of myself — it is an observation I make watching the high priests of painting. But so it is.

Jimmy: And further still: is there in your relation to your works something of cheating death? Leaving something you know will remain there after we are gone.

Álvaro: It does not haunt me — I do not think about it. I am a mortal being like everyone, and no one dies before his appointed day. What haunts me, honestly, is excellence. The artist paints for himself, he paints for no one: the first satisfaction is his own; he must be in love with what he has just made. And if that work transcends, it does not merely contribute to humanity: it immortalises the work and, thereby, the artist himself. It is a way of performing a bypass on death.

Drowning in Images

Jimmy: We are drowning in images. A hundred million photographs are uploaded to Instagram every day — and that is a small percentage of those uploaded to the internet, and a far smaller one of those taken. Two hundred years ago no images were generated beyond those the painters reproduced.

Álvaro: In the end, this will bring with it a great gravitation of the human being toward painting. Humanity has always swung back and forth: once one sector is overexploited, it moves inexorably to the opposite. And the opposite of the cold, calculated photograph exhibited on the internet is, in a certain way, the painting executed by a human being: it gives it a kind of second wind.

Jimmy: The young have no patience. Everything is a value of the instant: you look at a photograph and you no longer linger on it; you move to another, and the one from a second ago no longer has any value. Art, or the good photographers, force you to stop in time: to stand still, face that image, and reflect on it.

Álvaro: The new generations are not so attached to things. They see something, look at it, appreciate it, and move on.

Jimmy: Yet on the other hand they have a relation with the image that is stronger than reality: how they are represented in the image matters more than their reality itself. If a photograph shows them badly, they can sink into depression because someone uploads it. Decades of marketing and image-making strip away our naturalness. Forcing reality to fit a prepared image poisons the self.

Álvaro: Everything has its duality. There is a certain commitment to the image: a failed thing reverberates in the person’s spirit.

Jimmy: This returns us to the necessity of error. Admitting the flaw is what preserves the human; there lies the beauty.

The Honest Protagonist

Jimmy: Do you always need to be in the place of the image to make it?

Álvaro: I cannot paint anything I have not seen in person. First-hand experience is fundamental to me: being an honest protagonist. To be there, to touch the image I want to paint, the texture, the smell; to sit down over a coffee and watch the people pass. It is a sponge absorbing sensations. I like there to be noise — the bus, hey, taxi! — because it creates atmosphere, and you absorb it all as you go: the street, the people passing. There is nothing like painting on the spot. I have painted in nearly every country in the world and there is a common denominator in people: a sweet, romantic appreciation of the artist. They see you as someone who draws out the loving side of life — harmless. The human being needs that romanticism, because our lives unfold in a to-and-fro marked by a certain social coldness.

Coda: There Are No Bad Subjects

Álvaro: There are no bad subjects: there are bad paintings. Anything is a subject for painting: a bathroom, this table, this sponge. What is intimate is the reaction the painter had on seeing it, why he painted it — in his own intimacy, he knows why. If he is a good painter, his own soul will be reflected there, and the subject becomes secondary. Art is the most absolute simplicity of the most mundane thing, set down with the greatest impact.

Conversation recorded remotely in May 2020. Edited for reading from the original video transcript.