An imperious man, annoyed, his back turned towards a wide open window but who did not seem to be looking through it. He waited impatiently, immersed in himself, his head following a diagonal upwards to the left. The whole thing was framed in a creaky wooden desk, and outside you could smell the fumes, clouds and humidity of a northern European city.
P - "I was expecting you. I don't like latecomers, but this time I accept your apology."
He was wearing one of those folkloric Spanish festival costumes and a hat that looked like Napoleon Bonaparte's.
He approached the man curiously from behind, a magnetic animal, handing him a box of chocolates. One of those boxes divided into chessboards, where each square contained a different chocolate. He knew he would like them, after all, he was crazy about them. He would have bought it again with so little!
P-"But why do we need an hour to meet here too?" he asked with a falsely surprised and incredulous look.
P-"Are you kidding?! And how can you travel in time, meet me, without even knowing where you started from? Let's move on to more interesting questions".
I- "Will you teach me to draw?"
P - "Impossible."
I - "...and why?"
P - "Well, it's like teaching you to breathe. You just do it."
I - So how do you make these pure line drawings, so beautiful? Do you think about something? Do you have a goal?
P - "Look, it's very simple! The same way you write or read now. Just follow your truth. Come, let's draw together.
There was a beautiful transparent blackboard in front of them, it had appeared and been there for a long time, milky white. And Picasso was having fun with his young friend filling it with wonderful, clean, dark, deep black lines.
I - "But the gesture?"
P - "You follow the gesture. The trick, if I can call it that and not the posture of women, is to have a hand and an arm without resistance. Conductors.
I - "Like the copper wire in the batteries?"
P - "Exactly. The bulb is the finished work. The problem you are asking yourself mechanically is: what do I draw or paint inside this surface?
Instead, try asking yourself this other question: what would I like to show? Or what would I like to discover and reveal?" "And you can do that with whatever medium is available to you."
I - "Did you prefer materials?"
P - "I've always been a big life eater. For fear that something would slip out of my hands, I would put it on the canvas or create something new."
I - "Have you ever been afraid of not being understood or that people won't like what you produce?"
P - "To tell you the truth, no. I didn't care that much about other people's opinions. The important thing for me was the game, this movement of transforming reality, life into art. The "beautiful and the ugly", and even more the pleasure towards an object in very rare cases, are dictated by an internal impulse to the individual.
It is the taste, easy, of a precise time. The fashion.
And what I did was simply to destabilize something old. Without wanting to do it at all costs. There was an old, ugly door and I wanted to go beyond it, see beyond it. I untied it. The door remained on the floor and I entered the other room. The closed door is the unbroken tradition. The repetition of déjà vu. The recited style
I - And how did you know that the other room... ? "And before he could finish the question, the painter from Malaga was already answering, sometimes the answers came before the questions. Intuition? Or have the roles been reversed? Questions are now answers to answers that are questions?
P - "There was the door."
I - "I have a curiosity. What was your relationship with the women?
P - "They always said bad things about them. But I don't agree with them at all. They're points of view. I loved them all. Maybe too ardently. And that fire burned and felt like jealousy. If I can give you one piece of advice, "love them unconditionally, demand nothing in return, give, give and take what you need."
I - "Coming back to work, how did you impose yourself?"
P - "Well, it wasn't difficult, I had an incredible amount of paintings behind me. And I was at the right time in the right place."
I - "Were you flying?"
P - "No," he answers with conviction and promptly "Yes" with even more confidence.
"I felt an immense admiration for certain paintings and painters. That the only service I could do for them was to make them more visible to contemporaries."
"...and a little I stole" without giving the slightest importance to this word that had never sounded so funny.
"It's hard to shape pleasure if you've already got it all planned out. It's not like painting. Each sketch and its ongoing construction and reconstruction was each a work of art. But I needed to lie to myself sometimes. I didn't want to finish a work in a very short time. I could have. But I liked to keep playing with the forms. And then it's very good to give importance to some works more than others."
I - "Before I go, could you give me some advice." And he said it in a low, broken tone, sorry he couldn't continue the conversation any longer; he felt exhausted and the world around him seemed to begin to fade, to lose its definition.
P - "Let the hand guide you. Let the view be the observer Do not resist