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Pedro Mairal

The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra

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The painting (the reproduction of the painting) is in the Röell Museum. It stretches around a curved underground corridor that links the old building with the new wing. When you descend the stairs it’s as if you’re in an aquarium. The painting flows along thirty meters of the inside wall like a river. There’s a bench on the opposite wall where people can sit and watch the canvas go slowly past. It takes a whole day for it to complete its cycle. More than four kilometers of images gradually unfolding from right to left.

If I say it took my father sixty years to paint it, that makes it sound as though he set himself the task of completing some vast work. It would be more exact to say that he painted it over a period of sixty years.

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The myth now starting to grow up around the figure of Salvatierra is based on his silence. In other words, on his inability to speak, his anonymous life, on his work’s lengthy secret existence, and its almost complete disappearance. The fact that only one canvas has survived means that this unique piece is worth a great deal more. He never gave interviews, left no notes about his work, played no part in our cultural life and never had an exhibition. As a consequence, curators and critics can fill that silence with a vast array of opinions and theories.

I read that one critic described his work as “art brut,” an art made in a completely naive and self-taught way, with no artistic pretensions. Another critic spoke of the obvious influence of the Mallorcan Luminist painters on Salvatierra’s work. If that’s so, the distance that influence had to travel is a long one, but not impossible: from those Spanish Luminists to Bernaldo de Quirós; from Quirós to his friend and pupil Herbert Holt; and from Holt to Salvatierra.

Another critic mentioned similarities with emakimono, those long painted scrolls you find in Chinese or Japanese art. It’s true that Salvatierra had seen one of those scrolls, but it’s also true that he had already developed his technique of continuity in painting long before that.

But these hypotheses are unimportant. If I started trying to correct all the misapprehensions in what is being said about my father, I’d have no time to do anything else. I have to get used to the idea that Salvatierra’s work is no longer ours (by that I mean our family’s) and that now other people see it, look at it, interpret and misinterpret it, make critical assessments of it, in some way appropriate it. That’s how it should be.

I can also understand that the absence of the artist improves the work. Not only because he is dead, but because of the silence I mentioned earlier. The fact that the artist isn’t present, getting in the way between spectator and work, means that people are freer to appreciate it. In this sense, Salvatierra is a particularly extreme case. For example, there’s not a single self-portrait in the entire work; he does not appear in his own painting. In what is essentially a personal diary in images he himself does not figure. It’s like writing an autobiography in which you don’t even figure. And another curious point: the work isn’t signed. Although perhaps that’s not so strange. After all, where could he have signed a painting that size?