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swimming pool, where is it? Is it in me?”
Phenomenology is very important to me, to
clarify all this things.
WC: Of course, water is in the center of
everything. Water is an inner world, and an
outer world. Water in Islamic architecture
transforms into the paradise garden, it is
revelation, it is purity. In the Quran it is
said: “This is what we are made from.” But
water was also agriculture, power, and the
mirror of the universe; water was in turn
about control. The Alhambra was the jewel
in the crown of a system of irrigation. In the
Nasrid Palaces there is the image of the ocean
and of the world, but there is also the control
of the waters. The reflecting water surfaces
are the perfection of an entire system of ir-
rigation in a whole wider landscape. For me
water is one of the keys to the Alhambra.
So what does all this mean in the end? It
has to do with perception. You go into a place
and are moved by it. You can do nothing,
or else something goes on and you want to
record it. But it is not a direct record, it is
‘mediated.’ You do a sketch and years later
you do a painting that you are not even aware
is related to that experience, but it is indeed.
This is important because for me abstraction
is a means of compression. It is the opposite
of formalism. It is not making shapes to make
shapes. It is involved in feeling, in memory,
and in the unconscious. Things are what
they are, except that they are never what
they seem! It is like the swimming pool of
Merleau-Ponty, if it is a swimming pool?
JNB: The water clarifies what is painted
because the water is liquid and it is a sur-
face. The three-dimensional world is reduced
to its two-dimensional shape. Everything is
there: the reflections of the sky, of an object…
Bringing together all the three dimensional
objects, but as a surface. It happens a lot
with Cézanne. I do not know if you have
read Adrian Stokes. I like his writings very
much, especially because he wrote a lot about
the process of formation of stones. This is a
beautiful idea. This recalls your way of look-
ing at the universal via the concrete thing.
WC: And it is also the interrelation be-
tween the image made by the artist and the
inner life of the stone. And they are not
necessarily in harmony.
JNB: Stokes is not well known in Spain.
He wrote beautifully. A little bit like Ruskin.
WC: He spoke of “stone bloom,” as in a
flower. Interestingly, in the catalogue of the
exhibition, Alvaro Siza has written a very
compact text and at the beginning he has
a quotation from Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter
Lemons. It is very interesting that he would
know that. It is a description, at the begin-
ning of the book, where the author is in
Venice on a boat and he describes looking at
the city seeing it reflected and fragmented in
the water and then recalling the experience,
saying “it is as if it was reconstituted in my
mind through layers of rice paper as in an
abstract picture.” Siza said, “William, surely
that is you!” I loved the way he chose that
particular English author.
JNB: Stokes and Ruskin wrote beautifully.
And I mentioned Cézanne: Cézanne through
the eyes of Stokes. He says that to understand
Cézanne you need to have a sense of water.
And this is very clarifying.
WC: My ‘mental landscape’ drawings are
often on cardboard, which to me is a fan-
tastic material. You soak it, and you rip it,
and you turn it into something else. And
similarly, with the kind of liquids: I often
use industrial paints, because they have
a kind of density, like the night. And the
black and white photographs of the volcanic
landscapes are like Chinese paintings done
with ink. I don’t intend that, but they are.
This is not a deliberated method; it is more
a way of seeing. Back to Le Corbusier: he
had a way of seeing, and I have learnt from
him as an artist that way. The other thing I
learned from Le Corbusier, is the importance
of metamorphosis through drawing.
JNB: Le Corbusier is like an explorer, he
clarifies the mind.
WC: Yes of course, because the sketches
come from the mind. When as a young man he
draws the houses of Pompeii, or the Parthe-
non, he is drawing these buildings, but he is
also drawing his own mental world of forms.
So the drawing is a way of clarifying the inner
world through the outer world, and vice versa.
This in itself is abstraction of a kind.
«Le Corbusier is
like an explorer, he
clarifies the mind»
