Interview by Jhony ML
1. Gayatri Gamuz. This sounds like a ‘fusion’ name. How and why did you choose this name? What is your real name? And how much this name articulates your philosophical and artistic personality?
Gayatri is the name me and my husband Anand were choosing for our first child in case of being a girl. A boy was born and Anand started to call me Gayatri.
I was never keen in changing my name while being in India like many foreigners do, but when it happened I understood that an Indian name creates an intention to be closer to the people here so I felt it was good. This happened already thirteen years back so it is very normal for me to be Gayatri. Still, when I go to Spain I keep my original name, my family and old friends call me Inma and Gayatri is used only as my artistic name…………..
I never thought about my personality as being connected with either of my names.
2. In one of your catalogues, you have stated that your works tend to capture an inverted view of the world. Why do you think so?
This was a collection called “In reverse I tell so you understand me”……….The world is changing fast and unfortunately there are many reasons to feel the irreversible upsidedowness of the human/world …
The consequences of the sacrifice of the earth for the immediate needs of the humans are seen daily in graphics and statistics and news all over the world. I talk about it in a poetic way through my paintings, as a mirror of what we humans are and how we relate with other beings and with the earth…
3. Your paintings are like your name, chanting of a mantra, so deep with a lot of resonances. Do you think so?
…I like the intense deep poetic quality in any art form. I consider deepness an essential element in my work ….Eduardo Chillida said that “there is no art without poetry in it”…
When we see the world with a deep understanding it becomes another world; and same with people, issues, conversations, animals and plants. ’Deep’ means attention, it means ‘stopping and observing’ instead of ‘passing and looking’….….. The velocity of things is destroying the quality of ‘the moment’. This is the craziness of the modern world and of the modern man, the “man in a hurry” ……….
4. Gayatri, you seem to have a rejected a homo-centric world in your works. However, the point of departure looks like quite human centric. Why is it so?
One day, I went for a walk with my two children to a small hill to see the sunset. As we reached the top and sat looking at the orange sky we were amazed to see that we were not the first visitors, just two hundred meters away, there was a big group of monkeys, around thirty, who were also, like us, quietly in silence, sitting towards the sun. …Thus I got the inspiration for “Meditations on life and death”, a painting of a monkey sitting on the head of a man who is meditating .When this painting was exhibited some people in the public told me that it was a ”nice” painting but it was also a “little disturbing”.
The only way to recover the sanity of the world and the balance of human and nature is by dropping the ego-mind superiority of the human and by recognizing the equality with the whole……In my paintings, the human gets together and melts with other beings and other elements from nature in a high consciousness of deep understanding, of an elemental urgent understanding of intentions.….
5. Definitions are always funny and limiting. Still I would say that you have an eco-centric philosophy explained or dealt with in your works. Could you please tell something about your environmental concerns?
My belief is that ecological concerns are not anymore the monopoly of few individuals. My environmentalism is just a natural process which goes together with a deep change of consciousness of the full humanity towards a process of regeneration of the human and the earth.
In my adolescence and student times I was on the side of ecological and nature activism, but only while living in India I understood nature with a deeper meaning through the strong experience of living in rural areas of South India and trough Ananda’s teachings on pagan philosophy. I also got involved in the socio-ecological campaigns and activities he was leading in Cochin, particularly the annual tree planting and tree festival……
6. Flat surfaces with dominant figures suddenly get destabilized by the incorporation of animal or bird imageries. Sometimes they look very schematic. Do you follow a scheme in the works?
I do not like complicated images, even if I wanted I could not do them ………
I like to be understood not just by the exclusive public who is supposed to know about art.……….One time, while I was doing a painting of a big human face with a nest of birds in the mouth, a village woman entered my studio and saw the painting and started laughing noisily like I never saw anybody laughing, she was putting her hand on her mouth and clapping her hand with her leg and laughing with her full expressive body up and down …I was amazed, I did not know what it was all about but that day I had an experience that I will never have in an exhibition hall…………….
O.k., I will admit also that some times it does not completely work like we wish or want to believe. The other day I got a letter from my father which says: “Yes, your mother and me like your paintings a lot but sorry my daughter, I have to tell you that your paintings are more rare than a blue dog” (it is an expression in Spanish)…………Then I thought: Oh! my father has not visited enough galleries and museums.
7. You have lived in Kochi and later you decided to live in Thiruvannamalai. From the commercial hub to a spiritual hub. How do you assess this transition?
I do not like complicated images, even if I wanted I could not do them ………
I like to be understood not just by the exclusive public who is supposed to know about art.……….One time, while I was doing a painting of a big human face with a nest of birds in the mouth, a village woman entered my studio and saw the painting and started laughing noisily like I never saw anybody laughing, she was putting her hand on her mouth and clapping her hand with her leg and laughing with her full expressive body up and down …I was amazed, I did not know what it was all about but that day I had an experience that I will never have in an exhibition hall…………….
O.k., I will admit also that some times it does not completely work like we wish or want to believe. The other day I got a letter from my father which says: “Yes, your mother and me like your paintings a lot but sorry my daughter, I have to tell you that your paintings are more rare than a blue dog” (it is an expression in Spanish)…………Then I thought: Oh! my father has not visited enough galleries and museums.
8. before asking the previous question, I should have asked you something like this: How do you articulate your Spanish culture within the Indian ethos? Or have you fully adapted to the Indian culture and have become an ‘Indian’?
There is no question of adapting fully to any culture, again for the same reason as that in the last question…When we live for a long time away from our country of origin we belong just to nowhere and at the same time to everywhere…As a child, because of my father’s job, I grew up moving house from one town to another every two years. Naturally I and my sisters grow up without being attached to any town, friends, schools etc…..Somehow this non-attachment made me understand the world as a big space full of humans which are of very similar characteristics…….
Yes, I love Indian culture, Indian aesthetics, food, music, people...India is such a vibrant, alive, different country……….Because I have been already 15 years here or maybe also because my children are half Indian I feel one with this land in many aspects of life, but still my skin is white and I don’t pretend to belong here or to feel that India is mine …Sometimes the foreigners who live in India for a long time feel too much attached to the idea that they are superior to the ones who are here for a short time or who come just for a small travel…..I don’t have pretensions, I always say that I am a long time tourist in India, even on the planet, but this is part of another subject….
9. Interestingly, your works do not have any Spanish quality in them, I mean a trait that is typical of a European artist. Why is it so? (If at all I see a European trait, that is the non-deliberate surrealistic inclination in some of the paintings)
I never really analyze my paintings or myself from the point of view of being Spanish but you may be right…I do not think that to be non Indian is a very important element in my work……. The surrealistic inclination comes naturally, it has to do with the subconscious and with the intention of poetry which moves from the real ‘real’ to another poetic reality……I live in India so what I create is “Indian origin”. Wherever you are is more important than where you are from. A painting done in Spain is not the same than a painting done in India, even if we want to talk just about the weather conditions.
10. How do you select your themes and images? …
By obsession…………most of the day with the feeling of what to paint, how to finish this painting, how to get the best of this image?..... I feel that the most delicate job of an artist is not to know what to paint but to know what not to paint. There are millions of images which could be done but only few which should be the chosen ones, this is the important part, the correct choice.
I celebrate the return of realistic, hyper realist and figurative in the contemporary art practice. I also relate to the search for the tenderness in the human spirit which I find amazingly expressed for example in the photography of Rineke Dijkstra, in the paintings of Gottfried Helnwien and in the sculptures of Ron Mueck.
11. What decides your palette, theme or the moment of execution?
Everything is quite illogical, sometimes I think I am in the best spirit and I am going to have a wonderful day and make the greatest work and then nothing happens, and days that look dull end up being great and fruitful.
12. I would call you a settled wanderer who carries the memories of those paths that you have covered. They are heavy paintings. Each painting is a symbolic caravan. Comment please.
I am still a wanderer without a house of my own and may continue to be so. Sometimes when people ask me how long I took to do this painting I say that it took all my life till now.
13. Please talk about your current concerns and future projects
Lately I have been persistently obsessed about a field to explore and paint about, a picture of a dreamy world of a land without trees …… It is about the supposition of being on a land without trees and how the human relates to this new situation……….The symbolic desert land is a physical reality, which we constantly experience in all what represents and proves our destructive, infinite, indefatigable energy. It is also an imaginary reality of a world inside the World, the virtual world carried inside us that hurts deeply in our consciousness, in our intelligent brains, in our human identity.
Interview by Tanya Abraham - June 2013
1. Your work comes from the core of your being. Would you agree?
When a piece of art brings us an emotion it is because we get fused with the emotion of the artist and with the emotion itself which is the emotion of the world. Before people will go to cathedrals and temples to receive the emotion of the spirit, today we also go to museums, on Sundays, in search of the mystical experience of the emotion of being.
The core of my being is the core of my being creative. The mood to paint doesn’t come from the brain; the brain is not the creator.
Kant says: “the capacity of being touched with emotion has to do with the poet, not with the scientist” and “as more we know less we feel”.
The brain helps but it is not the master.
2. There are times when it seems as if your personality is deeply entwined with your work, at times it seems distinctively its own?
My paintings are a projection of myself, and also it turns around and it is a reflector for others, for the public, who sees themselves also on them.
3. The merger of two worlds comes alive in your work time and again, would you call it juxtaposition or would you say it is one and the same world which we perceive differently?
In my work appear two worlds because my personal sentiments are inside the duality of belonging to two countries. However, I also talk about others. Like migratory birds, the humans are changing their habitats. The globalized world is fusing ethnicities and cultures, thousands of different persons relate in all the cities of the world and virtually and physically, diverse humans are meeting. In this contemporary fusion of cultures are born “the children of the world”, they are the children of the Diaspora, the mixed race children, the adopted children, the immigrant children; they grow up with the bitter feeling of being different and displaced to finally understand that the truth is that the world is all theirs and they belong not only to one suburb or one city or one country but to the full planet.
4. In your collection of works titled 'In reverse I tell you, so you understand me’, you speak of how skewed the world is. Do you feel this is an irreversible change, that humans have gone so far as not to understand this catastrophic attitude, that being cynical is the only alternative?
I like to put a bit of humor in my paintings because it is better with humor than without. Humor sometimes gets to be cynical, not because I am cynical but because the subject chosen is so serious that when I handle it with humor it becomes cynical. The subject of the destruction of the planet is a very serious issue, and we keep “sawing off the branch that we are sitting on", like Professor Paul Ehrlich wrote talking about our relation with nature.
5. Your work titled 'Meditations on Life and Death’; can you explain it in context to your bodies of works?
I made this painting after a sunset with my children in Thiruvannamalai. We were in a small hill and while contemplating in silence the red sun setting, we turned around to see that few meters away from us, there was a group of monkeys doing exactly what we were doing, sitting in silence looking at the sunset. This activity, so human, so superior, so refined, was suddenly taken and practiced by monkeys. In this painting, while I place the monkey on top of the head of a man, I am knocking at the superior brain of the human, at his anthropocentric blindness. At the same time there is certain tenderness, a quite peace between the monkey and the human, a silent moment.
6. When did you begin painting about the condition of nature/earth and man?
What does it mean to you?
I belong to a family of seven children. My parents are from a small village in the south of Spain. Since my parents got married, because of my father’s job, the family sifted often from one town to another. We lived in rented flats and the children enjoyed the smell of the country only on holidays and occasional visits to my parent’s village.
As an adult I had the inert of going back to the roots, to the origin in nature. As I started painting this was my primordial subject.
7. There is an unsaid serenity in your works. It can be seen in the movement of your strokes. It is very vivid. The turbulence which you depict, it is surrounded by calmness. Can you explain this?
The turbulence which I depict is balanced not by my serenity but by the serenity of the other side of things. It is fair to show both sides.
8. Can you enumerate some of your first experiences of art?
As a child I was always involved in something to do with my hands , I did many dresses for my dolls , I did a lot of small figurines with clay which I cooked in my mother’s oven to her disgust ( it was too messy), I learned and loved crochet with my grandmother . Later, as an adolescent, while I was studying social work and I lived with friends, I always kept clay with me to do sculptures and I loved to go to see exhibitions and to the theater in Alicante . One day, while seeing a play I had a revelation, I did not want anymore to be just in the side of the public but also on the “other side” . That year I left social work to start studying art.
9. You have used metaphors and surreal images. At certain places you have the same object meaning different things, like the large ribbon, for example. How do you choose these metaphors and how do you place them to mean two different things?
The exaggerated ribbon is an element of ridicule, it is the hypocritical side of things. I placed it with the intention to decorate what cannot be decorated. In the course of life we accept many things as natural but they are not natural, like a man holding a gun, pure water being sold in beautiful plastic containers, domesticated wild animals…etc. When the ribbon is placed the question arises.
10. How did the body of work titled 'A Land without Trees' [2007] come about? It is the beginning of your journey explaining your connection to nature?
In my creative process one work takes me often to the next work or one painting takes me to a group of paintings. The collection “In a land without trees “ happened after I did a portrait of a man with a nest in his mouth, this man offers his mouth to hold a nest because the bird has no other place , because we are in a symbolic devastated land, a land without trees . This painting inspired me to do many other works related with it and it became a collection.
My concern with nature comes from a natural concern which all humans have from birth, nature is what sustains us and we are also nature. I am not more concerned or passionate than others; it is just that I focus often on it because I have a medium to express it.
11. Can you tell us about 'In Search of Something Else' and 'In Search of Somewhere Else', paintings from your body of works titled 'Selected Works' [2010]?
In these paintings I portray the constant searching, physical and metaphysical. The human being has been always in the mood of reaching or approaching, at the personal level of achievements and at the physical level of moving and exploring. In these two paintings there is a mystery, an emotion of being and also of not being, of being what we are and of the search for something which we are not.
12. In your work titled 'My Sky', you have painted a landscape. Rarely is a painting devoid of human or animal form found in this new body of works titled 'My Name is Gayatri Gamuz'. How do you view it?
For many years I looked at the sky in Thiruvannamalai and I wanted to paint it. This plain sky which it feels to me bigger here than anywhere else, was attracting me a lot. But I did not have enough justifications to paint it. One day, thinking about my new collection of paintings, it came to my mind “my sky”. The question of belonging, which constantly arise in me while I live in India, I solve it in this painting with an ironic statement of possession of something which cannot be possessed, the sky.
13. There is a spurge of your intimate details in your new body of works. It connects itself to a past, but is also of the present. “My name is Gayatri Gamuz”. It is a strong statement, would you say so?
“My name is Gayatri Gamuz” contains the adverb “my” and the name “Gayatri” which are both illusions. When I came to India I was Inmaculada and then I become Gayatri. The question of my name arose often in conversations, in media interviews and in myself.
With the titles: “my cow”, “my tropical birds”, “my sky”, “my relatives, myself”, “my bull “, I emphasize the illusion of the idea of belonging, possession, closeness, farness, familiarity, similitude and difference.
14. This show is it the culmination of a long journey? Where do you see yourself and your paintings from now on? Would you call the journey a fruitful, peaceful one?
Well, the journey has no end so it is difficult to see a culmination, or maybe it is more an abstract path than an infinite one, it has no clear definition, like life itself. And now that I use the term abstract I realize that my paintings have not a bit of abstract quality and to make it even more complicated, as I am writing this I remember the words of the contemporary master of abstract painting Gordillo in an interview: “ who says that my paintings are abstract? Did I ever declare that my paintings are not figurative?”
Anyway, going back to the question, I never felt I wanted to reach an end, in fact the culmination does not exist. Artists create paths which get linked inside a frame of thousands of years with other paths of other artists. There is not a point where you can say: “finally I reach” because that final point does not exist, there is no end, only the path exists and the path is the point.
When I think about my journey I find it fruitful, I feel satisfied. I did many paintings and many people saw them and I like that. . this present collaborative show is one of the most important in my carrier, to exhibit again with Kashi, one of the galleries in India who showed my works for the first time and to do it together with The Museum Fundacion Antonio Perez in Spain where I wanted to exhibit for a long time, it is a dream coming true. So I feel very happy.