TE22 Potpourri

Manuel Baixauli

UNKNOWN

MATEU My first commission arrived in 2002, months after my last exhibition closed, a failure in terms of sales and social repercussion, a failure in every way. Of thirty-five paintings, I had only sold one. The rest were still piled in my studio, conjuring up dust. Other times it’d been worse, I hadn’t sold any, but the feeling when this last show ended was the same as ever: wasted hope, time and energy. If you sell, you believe what you do interests someone, you get your self-esteem massaged, even though at the same time you feel the loss of the work you will never see again, your daughter exchanged for banknotes. Where will she end up? The gallery owner doesn’t tell you, he doesn’t want you getting in touch with the buyer, to make sure the next transaction won’t cut out the middleman. You don’t know who took an interest in your paintings, you don’t know where they will be hung up and looked at. On the walls of a living room, or an office, or a bedroom, where they’ll only be seen by a family of strangers and the few friends who visit them? Is that why I paint? So much solitude, so much reflection, so many demands on myself for that? For money? I barely make a pittance, a tiny part of what I need to live on. I’d love to live off my work, have all the time in the world to paint, not always getting to the studio tired after teaching high school, to teenagers who don’t give a shit about art. Ever since the day I hung the show, which was preceded by weeks of creative intensity, I hadn’t picked up the brush again. I had only scribbled, listlessly, a few drawings. The 91

fat man in a worn black leather jacket. He spoke the Catalan native to Alghero. They were an odd couple—Artur was tall and thin—as they made their way to the old quarter along narrow streets. The shops were beginning to open. The seller, who greeted some neighbors, tried to make conversation. Artur preferred silence. They climbed a musty-smelling, cramped ancient staircase to reach the second-floor apartment. On one side, it overlooked Cavour Street, and on the other the avenue along the city wall and the sea, with idyllic views far into the distance. The rooms were meager, damp, cold, with a medieval comfort level. Scant little windows poured the morning sunlight onto multicolored mosaic tiling. Artur looked at it all in silence, distracted, as if trying to recall a lost melody. They barely haggled over the price; Artur Bosch halfheartedly, as if it were some inevitable rite of passage, accepted the second price cut offered him by the seller, who was euphoric. He hadn’t been able to rent the place in four years, and selling it, without any renovations, seemed like a miracle, so he made no qualms about Artur’s one demand: hewanted the apartment emptied, with no furniture, except for the refrigerator, bed, a chair and a table.

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