How do you deal with the hastial painting process?

The process… I started with Xabier Alvarez Eulate. I met her at Olite, when I was 18. 1962, let's say. At that time, we hadn't seen any art book or painting. The calendar of a grocery store at home, the cross of the parents' bedroom and some photos. So far we had all our imagination. When we were studying at Olite, I found a leaflet of a drug, which also had white margins, and on that piece of paper I drew some drawings and showed them to Eulate. He found it interesting and lent me some books by Picasso. It was then that I was first opened up to heaven, or art, in essence: freedom, deformation, no similarities… It was then that, for me, reality began to be an excuse to talk about life. And reality is bitter, it's beautiful, it's hard, it's kind, and it's -- how it is.

And that's what you see on the walls of this church?

In a way, yes. There you have the kicks, for example. I remembered a lot of the kicks. However, my paintings are different from today's paintings. The ones now are plastic and the ones I painted are wood, from that time. They collided against the coast of the Canary Islands, they were rotting, and next to the swords were the corpses of many of those who returned to those pastries. The image was stitched inside me, I had made a lot of drawings, and I brought the subject to the walls of this church. They're worlds that we don't see or that we see but we don't want to see. On the walls of this church, along with pateras, I painted a human figure. I don't know what it does, whether it's looking, whether it's seeing or whether it feels something. We don't know where it comes from or where it goes. I mean, there's no official reading. I tried to draw a picture that looked at that pile of corpses and those human ruins. A little further down, that guy...

Tap the drum.

Have you read the Latorriz drum?

Gunter Grass novel. Yes.

There you have the tin drum. He wants to denounce Nazism, he has decided not to speak, but to play the drum. It destroys this, it breaks that... I wanted to paint it, to say no to the tragedy of the pateras, which is not possible, which is pure injustice. In front of the drum, I put another figure, and I exclaimed: [Edvard] Munch's cry. But Munch does not scream because the world goes wrong, but because he is wrong: he is a painter, he is in a great crisis and hence his roar. I've put them in front, one yelling at social injustices, and the other who wants to put their discomfort out.

This theme, along with other elements, appears on the left wall. On the right wall, other elements. The central element, in the central wall, is Jesus Christ crucified.

One day, while I was painting up the scaffold, a man entered the church. He had to have suffered an accident, and he was coming very awkward. He started talking to the mason, and after a while, I got off the scaffold. [Juan Ignacio] It was Lasagabaster, founding director of the Cathedral of Santa María de Vitoria. It gave me joy. He saw what he had done until then and hurried to say: “This has to be a church.” I had never thought about that. I had already made several drafts, a series of drawings, but it had to be a church, no, I didn't know. “It has to be a church.” This set limits on my work, not narrow, but it delimited my work.

The Church, but not the disciples.

Yes, yes. What does it mean that it has to be “church”? What is the “church”? This Andetxa church was built in the 16th century and reformed two centuries later. There the inhabitants of here have been married, they have carried out funerals, baptisms… The Church has been a meeting point in the small towns. I've been told that the church in Santa Maria has been played and misleading. A lot of things. When I started painting, I first painted Christ. Because of its size and color.

Not because of the issue?

I had no doubt about that. I knew it. I wanted to crucify myself, from the cross to the descent, to the resurrection… A mixture of Christian beliefs. Christ has died, God the Father has sustained him by the Sobacos, and his friends have put up a ladder to help Christ down. I had already made the sketches, I went up to paint… and I realized it didn’t work. All I needed was that the relationship between the elements I had in my mind flowed. As problems arise, I had to find solutions… I started working and realized I couldn’t take more than three hours. I was fatigued. I have a habit of working in a compact way. I fought the wall.

What is “fighting the wall”?

That is it! What people don't understand is that you have to fight a white wall, that that wall is silent, that it screams, and that you have to talk to that wall, about size, paint or composition. I started working around nine o'clock in the morning and worked until noon. In the afternoon I came alone, but not to paint, but to look. I would grab a chair, install myself in the center of the church, and start looking at what I had painted. Just looking. He said to people: “Being looking is not just any task. You can go into a dark room and turn on a candle: if you're distracted, it's pure darkness, but if you're attentive, that beam of candle light lets you see something. [It's excited] Nobody knows what that is, but there's something. And that's what I was going to look for in the evenings.

And did you find it because “something” has been said?

Before or after, I always saw “something.” And I don't know what it was either: in one, the painting of one; in another, the size of the human figure of the other. A world emerges within you, bringing you the next morning to the wall with you. And you'll touch whatever you've done, or you'll just pull ahead. For example, I have a friend, mathematician Jesús Mari Goñi, who took the train in Pamplona early in the morning and came to Vitoria. I would get off the train, take my bike and come to Andetxa to help me. I once referred to the head of an image. Jesus Mari brought me the paintings, which always accompanied me. At noon, he went to eat and said: “Do you know how many times have you painted that head?” and I: “Once.” She says: “No, 25 times!” “Have you told them?” “Yes!” I didn't joke. In fact, the walls are wrinkles, they make shadows, the painting you like at a given moment, the next time you don't like it.

In one you like it, in the next no, but you've already painted it.

In that case, I spent the whole morning painting a bad head, until I said “Orain bai!”. But the hardest thing is to say “Now yes!”, because there is no measure and the draft serves no purpose. In my sketches you saw a boss or a hundred bosses, but you can't copy a head by looking at the sketches. You have to get that head out that you have inside, and that's where the struggle comes, and that's where the wall starts to promise you, to lead your work, to lead the way... And when it's done, don't look back. That's the worst. I thought I wouldn't go back.

What do you mean?

For example, suppose I'm in the workshop, painting. I've got tired and I've left the job. I've been paisano, I've left, and I came up to look at her again. Zas! I've seen something. Damn it! Take the brush and I go, touch very carefully the detail I have seen… and at that moment something falls to me, or I get dirty in the street clothes, or… Looking back puts you to find something. It may happen by force majeure, but the truth is that it repeats and repeats itself. In this church it has also happened to me several times.

Despite these beautiful painted walls, the public cannot understand the world that houses the work, its meaning.

That's the problem. On the walls of this church you see countless elements. The public will know some elements, but many others will not. People need explanations and for that we have published a leaflet in which Jesus Mari Goñi and I, through texts and photographs, will be able to understand the public. For example, the vertical and the horizontal always appear on all walls. The painter has to insinuate those lines and the viewer, and that's the hardest thing, has to strive to see them. Make an effort. This is the first artistic lesson: the viewer must do the painting. In other words, besides seeing that there are trees, you have to wonder why these trees are there, why they have certain shades, why…

They're keys to walking through painted walls, to understand what you see.

I'm going to tell you a key, very important, for the viewer. I've painted a chrysalis on one of the walls. As you know, the chrysalis has a butterfly inside. If you try to pull that butterfly out by force, you'll die. The chrysalis must break the silk pupa by itself. The spectator who comes to this church of Andetxa is also a chrysalis, with a butterfly hidden inside it. It's the incidence of the viewer who doesn't come out of the pupa. I have given him clues so that he can follow the path. Everyone has to make that path, to the extent of their desires and possibilities. And it's not easy, because seeing art is not an easy task, but it's not reading, it's not watching movies. If we can see it, it also becomes a butterfly, a more beautiful, more beautiful, more wilted thing. More likely.

Otherwise, you'll see the world.

According to Plato, we live looking inside a cave. We see shadows there, and we think that's the reality. But one day, when you come back, look out of the cave, the reality is another. So in the church of Andetxa and in art in general: What is the reality that the artist sees and what the viewer should see? That is a very bad process, it is fixed, it is interesting, it means that questions are asked. And the world doesn't give us a chance to do that, it forces us to live in a hurry and a run, from distraction to distraction.