In Conversation With 🖌️ Guillermo Lorca

D: Hi Guillermo, very nice to meet you! We’ve been fans of your work for years, and it’s a privilege to get to talk to you and feature you on the platform. You’re in Barcelona right now. Are you living there or exhibiting?

GL: I have an exhibition at Moco Museum in Barcelona until November and It was a good excuse to spend a season in this city that I love. It’s a great place, sometimes a little crazy and  that can be a problem ‘cause it’s difficult to concentrate!

D: Are you working out there – are you painting as well?

GL: Yeah, I’m painting here too.

D: So we’re here to talk about your work. You’re a prolific artist. Is there something in your life that inspired you, that made you want to create?

GL: Nothing really specific. It was something that started when I was a child. I used to enjoy drawing, to get inside my imagination, to lose myself. I have really good memories – like a happy place in my mind – when my mother used to paint when I was a kid, I saw her and I wanted to imitate her, take some brushes and try by myself. There were also many art books and even though I didn’t understand anything about art history I used to spend a lot of time seeing images and illustrations from books – I was obsessed with dinosaurs like many other kids – It was part of good memories of my childhood.

When I was a teenager I hung up the brushes for a while, to focus on another passion; Tennis. Eventually I quit (although I still do a lot of sport) And then I returned to drawing and painting. I started to have feelings that I could connect with something really deep inside of me, but it took me time and effort to project that in my artworks.

D: Was there an age when things suddenly started to work for you, when you said ‘wow! This is what I love!’

GL: When I was seventeen I decided that I wanted to study art and do this as a career. I was pretty young and decided to try it.

D: Were there any artists that particularly inspired you at the time?

GL: I think one of the first ones was Gustav Dore, the 19th Century illustrator. We had a book of fairy tales illustrated by him – I was completely in love with his work – I still am now – when I saw his works,  they moved me to another period of history and I had the weird feeling that I’ve already lived in those places or situations.

D: Yes he’s an incredible blend of reality and fantasy. So, when you’re 17 or 18 you don’t necessarily have a lot of money for giant canvases. Where did you get the inspiration to paint on such a big scale?

GL: It started when I got one of my first jobs. I was asked to paint a mural at a vineyard in the north of Chile when I was 20 years old. It was a huge scale mural, 40 meters long by 4 meters high.

D: Wow, that must have been really exciting!

GL: It was! I had just started to paint and I had never painted something big in my life before. I was at the beginning of my career and, even though it was hard, I really enjoyed it. I also remember that when I was a kid I had a big canvas to paint on – about one meter long  – which is big when you’re a kid! I think that’s where the fascination of big format started.

I also  like the 1:1 relationship between the spectator and the characters on the canvas. Sometimes my compositions have many elements and the painting becomes large – it’s not that I necessarily want to paint everything big, it’s just that the composition makes the rules!

D: I know you’ve been asked this before but there are many levels to your paintings: there’s childlike innocence, and underneath there’s often fear, death, darkness. On one level there’s a fairy tale but on another there’s something much darker. Is that something you consciously set out to do or does it just evolve through the painting?

GL: It’s something more or less unconscious – the feeling that drives me to want to paint a subject I don’t have control over but during the composition I can realize different feelings or symbols. For some elements you can see tenderness or love or beauty but at the same time you have death or destruction. The first approach is unconscious but I try to get an harmony between those different forces.

D: Would you say that a lot of what you do is to challenge the viewer? Do you want the viewer to think and feel different things and to discover things in your work?

GL: Yes I do.

When you create some art work there’s a relationship with yourself. So there are things I paint because it’s important for me and that feeling, that moment is something you can’t translate exactly how it feels. But when I make a painting it’s not mine anymore, now it belongs to the public! So the people can interpret as they want, I just show possibilities. But  I like that, the work is enriched with the different experiences it evokes and the different interpretations.

D: That’s really interesting – have you ever been surprised by people’s reactions? Have people come to you and said “this painting means this!” And you never thought that?

GL Yes! People have come to me and say ‘’that reminds me of that’ and I say “yeah could be!’ I mean i know what i paint and i have my own interpretation or i remember some of my feelings in the moment i created the paintings but sometimes i actually forgot why i painted that! After years you don’t remember! But that’s also something that I want. When a painting is open to interpretation it can touch you, deep inside of you. It’s like a horror movie – if you show the monster in the first scene then there’s no mystery! The fear or other feelings need to be created for the spectator.

D: One painting that struck me was La Curandera. It has such tension.

GL: I started painting that in the middle of the pandemic in 2020 and it was a kind of therapy. For me it represents hope, she is trying to relieve the gorilla’s pain but at the same time she is causing him another great pain. She’s using that suffering to get the cure. There are many things happening in the painting, it depends where you put your attention.

D: Have you thought about making films?

GL: Sometimes I’ve tried to imagine my paintings as a movie. When the paintings are together they can interact with each other and then create another kind of world. But it’s more like a dream where they’re connected symbolically but they don’t have a narrative structure. They’re more lyrical, more like a vision.