“Now I Really Make Art”: Inside the World of Enric Aromí-Masriera
By Silvia Gonzalo, Germany Correspondent
Enric Aromí Masriera spent thirty years working as a photographer for major advertising agencies and developed his own technique for turning photographs into one-of-a-kind works.
Five in the morning in Argentona, a town in the Maresme clinging to the mountainside, with the sea below and Barcelona at the end of the coast road. Enric Aromí-Masriera steps out onto the terrace of his summer house with a café con leche made with rice-and-walnut milk and settles onto the sofa he keeps out there. Below, on the ground floor, is his studio. It is still dark: the mountain is silhouetted against the sky, and the yellow light of a streetlamp reaches the palm trees in the garden. The first birds begin to sing. Then the neighbor’s dogs join in. He finds them a nuisance.
At that hour he goes through the emails that have come in from the United States and Asia, answers them and, now and then, calls or messages a friend who lives in Seattle. As the sky grows light, he goes down to the studio to plan his day, and when he sees that his wife is up he returns to the terrace to keep her company over her coffee; they talk about what needs to get done and, some mornings, he comes up from the studio with sketches to show her.
He works in acrylics, watercolor, ink, graphite and wax, and uses an airbrush. In some pieces he also applies a process he developed himself, one that took him more than ten years. He separates the color layer, a very thin, transparent gelatin, from the photographic paper and lays it onto a surface he has already painted and prepared to absorb it. He called it Gelopaint. “Café con leche, blended and impossible to separate,” he says of the mixture, which includes resins, kaolin and marble dust.
He had started with Polaroid, lifting the gelatin and transferring it to watercolor paper; he could even work on a tree leaf. He wanted a photograph to be, in his words, unique, unrepeatable, unforgeable and on a support fit for fine art. The Polaroid limited the size, and with photographic paper that limit disappeared. By 2000 he felt he had worked out the process, and he kept experimenting until 2005: “I had invented the airplane but knew very little about flying.” In 2012 the Ibiza newspaper Última Hora wrote that he had come to the conclusion that he needed “something more than the simple capture of an instant with his camera.”
Canvases lean against the shelves, waiting. More than 2,000 square feet of what was once his photo studio, where no one is allowed to disturb him unless there’s an emergency and where the canvas is painted lying flat: he bends over it, a wooden mahlstick tucked under his arm, boxes of pastels open to one side and worn-down sticks rolling across the canvas.
From late October to April they live in their apartment in Calella, farther up the same coast, a beach town with the oldest working lighthouse in Catalonia. He still goes down to Argentona every morning. On some winter days the hours slip by while he paints; he leaves at four in the afternoon with the light already fading, and goes back to Calella to get scolded.
He was born in Mataró, a textile-mill city on that same coast, into a household of craftsmen. His father was a carpenter, cabinetmaker and restorer; his great-grandfather, a painter well known in the Barcelona of his day. At seven he began drawing with a local painter named Finet, who taught him to copy classical models, and at fourteen he exhibited his first photographs and earned his first commission, a portrait of the daughter of family friends. He trained for six years with Jordi Gómez, an advertising photographer and filmmaker, and with Josep Jofre, an industrial engineer and fashion photographer, and in 1974, after an exam of more than four hours at Barcelona’s Industrial School, he received official certification as a photographer.
After his military service he set up his first studio in an apartment that belonged to his father. His first two clients were Antonio Puig, one of Barcelona’s perfume houses, and Educa, Ravensburger’s concessionaire; he kept working with both for nearly two decades. Later came McCann Erickson, Ogilvy and J. Walter Thompson, who stopped sending art directors to his studio to oversee the job. They called him on the phone. For a vodka brand’s new bottle, one art director simply told him: “Me ha de gustarte,” a Spanish mash-up of “I have to like it” and “you have to like it.” It isn’t a typo, he points out: the image had to please them both.
For almost thirty years his studio never stopped: perfume, cosmetics, toys, beverages, and fashion campaigns shot in Langkawi, Malaysia, before the 2004 tsunami, in Aruba, in Kenya and in Vietnam. His photographs, he says, won awards at the Clios, at Cannes and at the New York advertising festival, all submitted by the agencies, though he has never believed in prizes awarded “because of who knows what interests—cronyism, money.” On those sets he had to act as photographer, creative and cop, and more than once he threw a client out over the way the client treated a model. Some of those times he lost the client and was never paid for the job.
“I have personally photographed every single model who appears in my work.” With Photoshop he then adjusts the sketch and often alters the features so the face does not resemble anyone recognizable. In 2008 he left professional photography behind.
The human body is at the center of his painting, almost always a woman’s. Up close the surface is worked in layers that are scratched, scraped or partly torn away, like an old, weathered wall, and the body is no longer whole. It dissolves at the edges, merges with the background, vanishes behind a veil or a geometric shape. And somewhere in the image there is something that should not be there. An egg where the head should be. An octopus’s tentacles wrapped around a shoulder. A flower opening where the skin ends. He gives them meanings: the egg as origin and as intelligence, the octopus as instinct and also as the many arms of society. But he does not impose a single reading.
Besides canvas, he paints on coffee sacks and leaves the seams and wear in plain sight. The titles, in several languages and mostly in English, are part of the viewer’s dialogue with the work. Sometimes they offer a clue, and sometimes they aim to provoke a reaction.
“A piece can take me six days or ten years. I don’t worry about time.” And when it seems finished, what comes out of his hands never matches what he had pictured: “That is the wealth I will take with me the day my time is up.”
He has exhibited in Seattle, Chicago, New York, Vienna and Hong Kong; at the Galerie Benchaieb in Paris, at the University of Salamanca and at the Art Taipei fair. In 2005, when CowParade filled Barcelona with cows painted by artists to benefit the children’s charity Casal dels Infants del Raval, one of them was his, and it was called Cowlon. Today Mishin Fine Arts in San Francisco holds some of his work, and a selection can be seen on Singulart. This year he exhibited again in a group show in Mataró, about two and a half miles from Argentona, the town where he hung his first photographs at fourteen and where he now has his studio.
Of his years as a photographer, he says he was a businessman back then, and a good one, though those commissions were “often what put food on my family’s table.” Now he makes art: “A lot of people may not like it, but it’s truly mine.”
In His Own Words
What is the last thing you do before considering a work finished and signing it?
I keep it in view for days, sometimes weeks. I place it in the studio so that I’m always seeing it or coming across it. That way I disconnect from the technical side and start judging the work as critically as I can. If I don’t tire of looking at it, I finish it with my signature and the last coat of varnish, and I photograph it for the archive and the certificates. If I have doubts, I forget about it: I take it off the stretcher and the canvas stays rolled up and forgotten in storage. Though that rarely happens.
When you photograph someone for a work, what do you ask them to do while you shoot?
I insist on getting to know the person, spending as much time with them as possible, sharing a meal or a trip, and then deciding together, if we click, how the work will be done, showing them the sketches and talking them over. By the time the “photographic moment” arrives, we have already decided on clothing, poses, lighting, expressions, landscapes or backgrounds. So I give them almost complete freedom within the framework we’ve agreed on. Then, from two hundred photos or more, I choose three, so we can agree on which one will be the basis of the final painting.
What, for you, is the difference between creating and working?
Creating is something I do practically twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year: images and ideas are constantly flowing through my head. I spend about three hours a day putting them in order, even my dreams, and throwing out the garbage or leaving them to mature in case I pick them up again someday. The sketches come out of those hours. For me, that nourishes the spirit, and that is true creation. Working is nothing more than the effort of giving physical form to what in my head is built in twenty dimensions, reducing it to just two, with the techniques and products available on the market. That transmutation depends only on the material and on my limited abilities.
How do you feel when one of your works leaves your home?
Although I paint for myself, the mere sight of a finished work, if it satisfies me, fulfills its purpose: the process ends there. It’s one more step in my evolution, and I don’t know where it will lead. I don’t mind parting with my works, because I know that the people who buy and collect them understand what I’m expressing, and that brings me closer to them. That creates an important bond with whoever has a part of me in their home. They are usually people whose abilities I admire, and I always learn something new from them.
After closing this stage, what is the first thing you will do when you stand before a blank canvas again?
I have never stood before a blank canvas without knowing long beforehand how and with what I’m going to fill it. In my case, the stages overlap. I try to be an organized and methodical person; order and cleanliness are important. In principle, I spend six months creating and the other six painting. Right now I still have about three works left to paint from this stage, which I started in April, and I’ve already drawn some twenty sketches for works I’ll begin next year. Still, I might suddenly start working on one of them at five in the morning, when I usually get up. I’m often so excited to give physical form to what’s in my head that I can’t hold back.
Some images will stay in his head. Others will take shape on canvas and awaken memories Enric will never know. What he painted for himself will also belong, intimately, to someone else.
