Pedro G. Romero (Aracena, 1964) accepts with resignation the avalanche of calls he has been receiving since this weekend, when he was awarded the National Prize for Plastic Arts and the corresponding 30,000 euros for his “consolidated career whose artistic, intellectual and material work” that “encompasses multiple fields of meaning and apparently opposing formats (sculpture, cinema, archival productions, performances, etc.), integrating conservation and research practices into his artistic work.”
Accustomed to living on the fringes of heterodoxy and experimentation, he receives this award with gratitude, but in a relativistic way. “A radical artist, as they say I am, does this regularly, but with flamenco I have learned that one can be both hegemonic and marginal. Being in palaces and institutions and continuing to live in Las Tres Mil, living a different life. In that sense, I am not having a bad time.”
The national jury appreciated Romero’s contributions in such famous projects as his FX file, popular either A for ArchipelagoBut it all started for him in the most casual way. “I have always been interested in painting, since I was a child,” he remembers. “It was Ignacio Tovar who chose my work when we could not even talk about it, he included it in an exhibition called City invaded and that was my catapult. I was very young, and almost without realizing it I was integrated into a collective in Germany, a gallery owner contacted me… When I became aware of it, I was already in a market logic. The Sevillians were then in fashion, everyone wanted to have one in their ranks. It was so dizzying that I forced myself to stop and ask myself if the studio, the gallery and the museums, the two-year cycles in the art world, were really what interested me.
The time of geniuses
Among these answers, Romero was clear that he had no desire to submit to formal or technical corsets, although he came to this conclusion more intuitively than anything else. “Life has made me travel, from the beginning I have done exhibitions as well as theater and music, with projects with names like Futurist Drum or Mathematics. What has always interested me a lot is collective work. Now, in cinema, I have naturally found this idea that a film is made among many others,” he explains. “This award also rewards a whole situation that has been created, that we have created, in Seville and also in Barcelona, a series of collectives with various forms of production that form a strong scene, which works almost by itself. We are no longer in the era of geniuses of art, even if other disciplines are full of them. In art, work today depends on a greater number of factors and not on the inspiration of a single person.
Another springboard projected by Pedro G. Romero’s work was flamenco, a field in which he worked with figures such as Israel Galván, Rocío Márquez, Niño de Elche, Tomás de Perrate, Úrsula López and Rosalía. “I started as an amateur, working with friends like José Manuel Gamboa or José Luis Ortiz Nuevo, and rubbing shoulders with Enrique Morente, Rafael Riqueni, Pepe Habichuela, Carmen Linares, the people who frequented La Candela in Madrid… Finally, I ended up with Israel Galván doing The red shoeswhich constitute a turning point at the height of the Omega de Morente, or beyond. This montage marked me. I wanted to resist, I didn’t want to trivialize my relationship with flamenco, but the truth is that it gave me visibility in a scene that was not that of art. Thus, between two scenes, one bounced off the other and unexpected effects occurred.
One of these effects: Rosalía mentioned during the promotion of her album Bad will a book that Romero had recommended to him, and the name of the Huelva native has almost gone around the world: “Something like that makes you think about the world we live in,” smiles the artist. “They interviewed me even more than today with the award, in gossip magazines, fashion magazines… Even my little girl thought that her father must have some importance, when Rosalía mentioned him.”
In any case, for many, Pedro G. Romero was part of a group of “liberators” who would come to save this art from the clutches of the guardians of the essences who had kidnapped it. He does not consider himself completely as such, but he remembers that “even Manuel Herrera, the director of the Seville Biennial who would bring things back to order after Ortiz Nuevo, supported us. We were twenty years ahead of what was being done. I knew that the critics were going to crucify us, but he told us: ‘Go prepare another show for the next Biennial.’ In flamenco, the central and the peripheral are always alternating.
Cult vs. Popular
“The most folkloric critics have offered us monuments to insults, but since they are not very intelligent, they did not realize the monster they were building,” he continues. “Those were the times. Today, at the Biennale, we find this absurd effort to return to order, but without head or tail, with things that are once again in disorder, while the artists are already elsewhere. These are things of a city that sometimes shrinks, but the time of films and chickpeas is already over. We are in an era where there are networks, the Internet and many things that leave this discourse in a ridiculous blah blah blah. I came from these galleries where a guy started to pee and people calculated the arc of the piss, so I was not going to be afraid of anything. What we have tried is for flamenco to reach maturity, for it to speak like other arts, without complexes, to get it out of that minority in which young critics and politicians want to keep it, because it interests them for their parties.
Finally, when asked what Andalusian art needs to get out of this certain underdevelopment that it always seems to drag, he sighs before answering: “There are many things. The most important thing is to strengthen local situations. We artists also have a great fault, with this desire to distinguish the cultured from the popular. Or, from the same angle, approaching themes like Holy Week, the Fair or El Rocío, when in the 19th century there were already readings that deserved to be saved. Or bullfighting, with this simplification of the problem of naive discourses. Nobody here takes seriously the fact that bullfighting is a culture and that now many lines can be worked on, but everything is trivialized.
“On the other hand, this obsession with the Picasso Museum, without asking whether it is more Malagasy or more Parisian… It seems to me to be a missed opportunity. The interesting thing would be to ask what was the real modernity that existed in Seville and Andalusia, all those artists of the 1910s and 20s of the last century, the Ultra and all the rest, who made Seville appear on the mastheads of Dadaist magazines throughout the century. world. There is no place to know. And without knowing our version of modernity, we will always do the wrong thing. Brazil has its own tradition, Argentina too. It does not happen here. “German tourists come to Malaga to see an exhibition of German artists.”
