Kasimir De Dalmau Oriol

What painting means to me.

Painting allows me to communicate and share ideas and emotions with people, particularly the people who populate my environment, now scattered over a broad area thanks to social networking: I communicate with them through shapes, forms, colours and signs that eventually form a code, which anyone who wishes to seriously confront my painting will have to crack, or at least try to crack. Someone who chooses painting as a means of expression has not chosen writing, or music, because if this were so we would be talking about literature and poetry, or musical scales. In any case, mine is not a conventional alphabet, but rather has been invented by me, with such an extreme flexibility and adaptability that it eventually questions its own coding system: that is why I think that art is a radically intimate and subjective language that is rooted in individual freedom, and for that very reason it eventually dynamites the code it establishes.


It is evident that I can guide the interested spectator with words, a title or a brief comment, although not so much as an interpretation of the work, but rather as an element the spectator can use if they want to get closer to the work. The artist's creative freedom h...

This tells me that a latent, implicit tension is established between the work of the artist and the observer of the work. The artist has decided that his creation is art. Simply and plainly. I believe that he is empowered to do so by this inalienable right. If our work does not move the spectator, if not does not perturb or alter them, if a dialogue is not established between them both, then we may say that in this case the artist or his work have failed, and we will even have to admit that the work is not art for that specific spectator. And it is not art because it will never be more than a simple material object that has left them indifferent. For this reason, cultural and educational policies prompted by the public sector are particularly important in developing citizens' artistic sensitivities. I think, although I am not entirely sure, that art can help to form better citizens.

But if the establishment of a dialogue between work and observer is, in my opinion, an indispensable factor that must precede the consecration of a work of art, it is not the only one. Beyond the emotion it conveys to the observer, the work should also be capable of eliciting a reflection, understood as the embodiment of an idea or feeling, distilled t...