Member of a bourgeois family in Barcelona, in which a grandfather and an uncle painted as a hobby, Santiago Carbonell knew from childhood that he wanted to paint.
When little Santiago communicated this to his father, he found a positive response: "If you want to be an artist, you will have to finish school first and then you will paint, but you have to do it in order to live."
I started working in the United States for a gallery in Miami, but mainly I painted landscapes in West Texas, in the desert. I like the desert landscape, it is not that I am a landscaper but I have practiced it a lot and I continue to paint it. The fact is that I had the opportunity to be invited to Mexico. I came for fifteen days, which lasted to three months; I was traveling with my backpack knowing the country and I loved it and I fell in love, because I felt at home. I finally returned to the United States but I could no longer live there, so I grabbed my belongings, which were not many, and returned. In Mexico City I met Enrique and Carlos Beraha, owners of an important gallery, who told me they were interested in my paintings; I had no plans or where to live, and by chance a friend who had an empty house in Querétaro told me if I wanted to go paint there, and I have lived there ever since. I settled down and felt like adopted by the people, and I adopted this country, because I feel half Spanish and half Mexican.
Painting is like cooking, it is done with love, with care and with patience. I like medium and large format paintings. I paint very slowly, it takes me about two months to finish a painting. I carefully plan the painting from the beginning, think about it in all its details and do not deviate. I imagine how it will look finished and there is almost no room for modifications or regret.
At first glance Carbonell is a realist painter, influenced by romantic and neoclassical painting of the nineteenth century, who takes up the obsession with unexpected detail. He resorts to the use of fabrics to cover or undress his female models, who seem to float in the foreground of a landscape of the Mexican plateau; to the softness of the fabric and the skin, Santiago opposes the hardness of the earth, stone and pebble, all framed by the softness of a light about to die.
I really like the relativity of space and time. Take the objects out of their context and put them in different contexts to accelerate recognition, so that the viewer does not remain passive before the painting and seeks its interpretation by accelerating thought. I don't want to do portraits; more than painting figures, what I like is painting. Painting for me is not a pleasure, it is a pain. Of course, I enjoy painting a female figure more than a glass.
Of gentle treatment and calm speech, Santiago shows us the garden of his house and in the distance the Queretaro landscape, which looms in the distance. In his short career as a painter, Carbonell has garnered critical acclaim and recognition from collectors. Group exhibitions were followed by individual exhibitions in Mexico, the United States and Europe, and some of his works have been auctioned in New York. However, Carbonell wants to pause to reflect and get out of the gallery environment for a while: I want to paint and save my paintings, make a collection of my work and not feel pressured by the insistence of buyers.
Source: Tips from Aeroméxico No. 18 Querétaro / winter 2000
