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“Art and sport can be found in the same creative space”

2022-09-17T10:43:00.538Z


The Mexican painter María José Romero, winner of the DNA Paris Design for her intervention in a skate park in Acapulco, considers that creativity is the most important thing in life


A neat and orderly, bright, impeccable studio that breaks the mold.

That it has nothing to do, anyone would think, with this action painter who empties herself in front of the stretcher in sinuous strokes.

It is not a question of a split personality, however, it is just that María José Romero (Mexico City, 52 years old) has spent a whole year without holding a brush at home.

She went out to conquer the street and her latest work,

Flow

, which draws curved paths on a skate park in Acapulco, has won the DNA Paris Design 2022 award. The skaters have spoken: art has given soul to the place.

The wheels of the skateboards have also left their brushstrokes on that track that is part of the 22 hectares reformed during three years of the Papagayo park, in the famous Mexican city.

Romero is happy to have found a fruitful dialogue between art and sport.

He believes that Paris has rewarded just that.

And don't even cry, she told herself when the pandemic shut down galleries, museums, projects, and sales.

You are creative, to reinvent yourself.

Ask.

And he went to Acapulco.

Response.

I launched myself into public space.

I was walking with the architect who has modified the place when I saw the skate park [design by the firm Tecnósfera, by architect Bruno Jarhani].

And there was the vision.

It's that as a child I took swimming lessons, I was introverted and shy.

I spent all my time underwater watching how the light reached the bottom and thinking about how boring the lanes in the pool were, and in my imagination I traced other paths, which went around, in and out, and I followed them.

When I got to the skate park I saw my pool, but without water.

Q.

It sounds sad, without water…

R.

It is more interesting, because there will be skaters and they will give dynamism to the line, those who skate it will understand me, I thought.

The thought kept me from sleeping.

I proposed it to the architect and met with skaters to see how they saw it.

If

Flow

adjusted to his pirouettes and tricks, if the line I drew was good for them.

They saw that my curve was organic, no straight lines, perfect.

One of them said when he saw my paintings: 'It's the same thing I do, but with the skateboard.

I already knew that skating is an art'.

We understood that art and sport can be found in the same creative space.

Aerial view of the work entitled "FLOW" in the gardens of Papagayo Park. Courtesy MJ

Q.

Is skateboarding art?

A.

They are creating.

Paths and routes.

And they are having fun and improvising in the moment, depending on the space, which is the same thing that happens to me.

Creativity is the most important thing in our lives.

There should be a creativity class from very young.

Q.

But is that learned?

R.

I think we can all develop it, you learn that, yes.

Knowledge frees you, they tell you in therapy, but it's not enough, creativity is needed to turn the patterns you repeat, to approach them from other sides, to have fun, to play.

Q.

Creativity makes you free, you say.

R.

If you live your life just repeating what you already know, where is freedom?

If you cook the same thing every day, if you talk the same with your partner, if you go to the same places.

The only way for creativity to exist is in a space where you don't know.

Q.

But artists sometimes spend their entire lives making the same painting, don't they have creativity?

R.

We would have to see if it is the same painting.

But some are obsessive, yes, less free.

Perhaps they find a formula that is sold and… well, there they stay.

But I do believe that creativity is important to develop, it is courage.

Why are we afraid to play?

The boy was not afraid when he played and now he scares us.

If we make a mistake, you get up and do it again...

P.

That the artists, I don't know what my boss would think.

R.

Well, yes, but in those mistakes you can open spaces for other things.

P.

She says that she paints for herself, but in the case of the skaters, of Flow, it has been the other way around, absolute interaction with the one who is going to use the rink.

A.

Yes, public projects are collaborative.

P.

If your work did not have skaters, would it be less work?

A.

No, because the work itself, without the skaters, changes color with the light of day, with the clouds, the shadows, with the rain when it gets wet.

The rink is alive without skaters, but they activate the work when they enter, they play with the line and follow it or cut it, there are already two dialogues there, my calligraphy and the skaters.

María José Romero in her studio in Mexico City.

Inaki Malvid

Q.

They are like little birds in the sky when they fly with the skateboard on the ground.

R.

How crazy that I say it, because that's how I saw them the day we opened the track and about 200 boys from all over the Mexican Republic arrived, they were summoned through the networks.

I was waiting at the gate to enter and they looked like those birds that come to trace their flights, their circuits, they already left the track all marked, which I love.

It is his

flow

that speaks with mine.

P.

These interventions in the public space give more to play.

R.

Yes, the truth.

Who said that art is childhood recovered at will... I don't know who, but it's very nice because it's for playing, creativity recovers the game for adults.

P.

After 30 years in the trade, do you feel the artistic maturity of your own language or is there much to learn?

R.

You always want to play with more things, now a skating rink, and then what's next?

In art there is a path, which is to crawl, walk, run and then fly.

You always seek to go further, other spaces of creativity.

First you have to learn the rules, as Picasso said, to break them you have to know them.

Q.

Has this urban art in Mexico surpassed muralism?

R.

Street

art

is a branch of muralism, which will always be there, because it marked us all, but I would like to see things a little more abstract, because it is still figurative and suddenly it bores me.

There are artists who are doing very interesting things in the public space.

Q.

You studied visual arts.

R.

Yes, but I have always been crazy about knowledge, I like physics, mathematics, psychology, I investigate how the mechanisms of the mind work, they fascinate me.

I want to understand life, what we are made of.

P.

And you begin to understand it?

R.

A little yes, but the human being is always reinventing himself, there is always the surprise factor, new scenarios such as, right now, the pandemic.

Q.

What path would you like to travel now?

R.

I want to see if I get other [skate] rinks in other places.

This goes a long way.

I would like to take it to other places, Paris to begin with, Los Angeles, I am dreaming big, but it is an educational project that creates community.

And I'm about to release a documentary, it's also called

Flow

, which came out of all this and where skaters like Eder Martínez, Miguel González, Ángel Santiago el

Sombra

, or Ángel Ávila

el Gallito

participate .

Also Tolly or G. Hurley Santos,

Skating Culero.

And we also recorded those 200 birds flying on the spot.

I'll send it to festivals.

P.

Does the boiling of urban art occur because the artist decides to go out and look for people who do not enter museums?

A.

Yes, too.

Perhaps we were bored with the old ways of seeing art, and there are many exhibitions that have become very rational, where you have to read a speech that you don't understand to get closer to works that you don't understand either.

I get in trouble saying this, but it's the truth.

Sometimes people come out of museums, galleries, saying, wow, I feel like I don't know anything, or I'm afraid to ask because they'll tell me I don't know anything.

This stuff about the art market and the speculation about what is art and what isn't has contaminated us a lot.

If you listen to a song and your hair stands on end, that's it, I don't need a speech to understand it, I go to a concert, smoke a joint and that's it.

María José during the intervention in the gardens of the park. Courtesy MJ


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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-09-17

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