Oscar Tusquets: "I have an ego far below certain colleagues and well above the average"

We are in the lobby of the Hotel Sweden, the

in the stately Las Cortes neighborhood of Madrid where the interviewee is staying, and where a team has set up a cumbersome set of lights and cameras to film a documentary about his vast life and work.

Tusquets, who is traveling with his partner, the photographer and writer Eva Blanch —author of the images in his latest book,

he appears dressed as a brush ready for interrogation.

He is going to take full advantage of his stay in Madrid.

This afternoon —half for work, half for pleasure— he will see his friend, the painter Antonio López, and tomorrow with his close friend, Mario Vargas Llosa.

He tells it as if nothing had happened in the middle of a hell of a racket caused by some works in the street.

He doesn't even flinch.

His confessed half-deafness and his years of seeing the works of his buildings seem to have shielded his hearing.

Another thing is the backlash.

He wrote

Well, we've been through a pandemic, I said we'd come out poorer and dumber, and that's how it has been.

I was referring to that “pain” of growing old that you allude to.

I am aware of being privileged.

I'm a bit deaf, but other than that I'm extremely lucky.

Every morning I wake up feeling well seems like a miracle.

And, yes, getting old is a pain in the ass, but it hasn't quite hit me yet and I still have a lot of fun living.

What is the worst thing about getting old?

the ugliness

As much as we deceive ourselves, beauty is associated with youth, since the Egyptians, and, deep down, we know it.

Nefertiti fascinates us all so much because she is young and beautiful.

I'm a bit deaf, but other than that I'm extremely lucky.

Every morning that I wake up feeling well, it seems like a miracle.

Are you so slave of beauty?

In the book, as you know, there are up to ten reasons why it sucks to get old.

The worst, of course, is losing friends, and health, and physical faculties, but you've asked me to tell you just one thing.

He has not mincing words.

A great friend, and great teacher, Federico Correa, said that I had a bald tongue, and, at this point, I'm not going to grow hair.

In exchange, he has hair on top.

That is inheritance from my mother.

I had an intense relationship with her, more than an

.

He was obviously in love with her.

And that they say that the obligation of the son is to kill the father to advance.

Well, says Houellebecq, who is a writer that I like very much, that children cannot love their parents, because they are the authority, the prohibition, and I find it brilliant.

We love them when we lack them.

And something like this has happened to me, personally and professionally.

I think the generation immediately after mine has respected me much less than they do now.

I have a very rewarding relationship with young architects.

And I think that they, more than my children, are my grandchildren, to understand each other.

His parents were rich and enlightened.

Her sister,

Man, if I had been born in another environment, I don't know how I would have turned out.

I was the son of the Catalan bourgeoisie, I went to the German school, which was fantastic, the first mixed school in Barcelona, ​​where we went as Catholics and Protestants.

I tell you again, I am very aware of having been very lucky to be born how and where I was born.

Architect, painter, designer, writer... Currar, has worked on his own.

I think it is obvious.

Not everything is the origin.

There are brothers that one is brilliant and the other is not.

I am a scattered artist due to my inability to specialize.

For me, work has always been a pleasure.

I get terribly bored with the bureaucratic part, yes.

And it has also been a privilege to be able to delegate it.

I see the municipal architects, or those of the gas, who are frustrated architects.

They have not been able to have a creative life as a designer and, therefore, they hate those of us who have been able to.

This is always so.

There, there, making friends in the guild.

I know I make enemies by saying these things, but it's like that.

I think you were 'polyamorous' before the term was invented.

It's just that Barcelona in the sixties and seventies was absolutely crazy.

We did not believe in private property;

then, no one belonged to anyone.

We all slept with everyone.

My girlfriends slept with all my friends, and I slept with all my friends' girlfriends, and vice versa.

We believed that the couple didn't make any sense, that theirs was the commune, we couldn't be jealous, and if you were, you were a fool, and you swallowed them.

We take it to the extreme.

We all slept with everyone.

My girlfriends slept with all my friends, and I slept with all my friends' girlfriends.

Despite the feelings?

Despite Them.

It redeemed us that this militancy was very sincere, but we suffered a lot.

I neither regret nor am I proud.

It happened like this.

Over the years, does one become more conservative in that field?

Well, the fact is that at that time there was an excitement in Spain, a desire to live and a brutal desire for change.

I have been lucky to be young in a wonderful time.

I meant you.

His current partner is 30 years younger.

Are you more conservative in love today?

I don't know if all the older ones will be.

I hate to generalize, but I am.

What is sex like at 80?

Different, less photogenic.

Sometimes embarrassing for others.

There are old people who display a very active sexual life.

But a dirty old man is only forgiven if he is a great artist.

Are you one thing or the other?

I'd say neither.

He has made from lamps to chairs, houses and palaces.

What is his most beloved work?

Well, I would say the little house in Pantelleria (in Italy), the auditorium in Las Palmas and the Naples Metro.

The relevance of the works is not in their size or their budget.

Look at the works of Vermeer, or Dalí.

Sometimes they measured 20 centimeters by 18 centimeters. And they were masterpieces.

In his latest book he says that abstract art bores him.

In other words, you go to the Cuenca Museum and jump out of the Hanging Houses.

Let's see, there are beautiful, decorative works there, like a Persian rug, which looks good wherever you put it.

But there are works that say nothing to me and, in abstract art, everything that interests me is gone.

It's what Bacon said in an interview: jealousy, meat, sex, death.

All that interests me, is not.

When I saw him I said, "My God, Bacon, a guy who thinks like me."

The most serious project I have is to grow old and die with dignity

Again making friends among fellow painters.

Well, I have many.

I like that they love me.

Dali was.

And Antonio López is a great friend.

All my painter friends are figurative.

All.

I don't have one that does abstract art.

Perhaps because the coldness of art is a reflection of that of the artist?

Well, and for what I think of his profession.

It's so much sexier to be figurative.

Very clearly.

You can say of Tàpies, for example, that he had good taste, excellent, in fact, but sexy is not the word.

Define “sexy” in that context.

Don't make me define.

Once with Cela, the Nobel, another friend, who spoke perfect English, the word 'sexi' escaped me and he scolded me.

"That's why we have the word cachondo in Spanish," he told me.

Well that.

Speaking of magnitudes.

how big is your ego?

That's a hard question.

But let's say it's way below colleagues I admire and who are friends of mine, and way above average.

What do you expect from life at 81?

I have it very clear.

I try to make my daily life pleasant.

Look at this trip, for example, I come to present the book, to film the documentary and to see my friends.

But the most serious project I have is to grow old and die with dignity.

I have very young children.

When Eva wanted to have them, I said: “I'm not going to last you very long”, maybe I won't be here in three years and they won't remember me.

I've already given you everything.

I think that now that they are about to turn 18, they will remember me.

DISPERSED ARTIST

This is how Óscar Tusquets (Barcelona, ​​81 years old) defines himself, although, for him, I would sign Oscar, without accents, because he does not like "accents in capital letters".

The anecdote gives an idea of ​​the extent to which aesthetics matter to this "architect by training, painter by vocation, designer by adaptation and writer to make friends", according to his own self-portrait.

Son of a wealthy and enlightened couple from the Catalan bourgeoisie, and brother of the late editor Esther Tusquets, Óscar is the author of dozens of works of all kinds, from lamps to teapots, through the Alfredo Kraus auditorium in Las Palmas, or the Metro from Naples.

He is the partner of the photographer and writer Eva Blanch, he is the father of two 18-year-old children.

He now presents 'No figuration, little fun',

a journey through some of his favorite works of universal art, illustrated with photos by Blanch, where he confesses the boredom that abstract art produces for him.

He does not rule out that it is the last.

Not the penultimate.

50% off

Exclusive content for subscribers

read without limits

subscribe

I'm already a subscriber