Empordaguia


  1. CULTURE
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  3. TONI AGUSTí, THE PAINTER OF SANT LLOP

Toni Agustí, the Painter of Sant Llop

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At the approach to Pals, in the number 42 of the Enginyer Algarra street, the artist Toni Agustí opened a very special place last summer: it is a showroom and shop that stocks all kinds of more or less ancient objects, from clothes and shoes to furniture and records, as well as pieces of art. These he mostly makes himself, and he shows them in the interior where he has established his studio. The place is called Mercat Sindicat because it used to be home to the Rice Growers Association (Sindicat) of Pals. The walls still show murals from before the civil war in perfect condition. Toni Agustí passes most of his time here, but he also tries to get in a daily trip to Llafranc to feel the sea air. His home is in the rectory of Torrent in Sant Llop, built in 1700. He feels especially at home here and therefore likes to be identified as the painter from Sant Llop. Yet his real origins are in the Garrotxa and where he often visits his mother. I am a Garrotxi from the Emporda, he explains with that sarcastic yet tender tone he maintains throughout our talk. He left Olot because the thickness of the countryside suffocated him and settled down in the Empordà because the voluptuous femininity of this area fascinated him. He also believes that he will end up in Africa, where he often travels to, especially Morocco and Mali. He feels drunk from its smells and sensations that remind him of his childhood on the farm in Olot. The open sewers in the road, the smell of poultry and dung, the children playing in the streets. It is his childhood that Augustí sees his origins as an artist. In Olot he would go to the workshops after school where they made figures of saints. The smell of plaster and of oil paint being used under the light of a naked bulb awakened my interest for materials, he explains.

These memories were especially fruitful for his most recent work, as he has been developing figures of Christ. Through the image of the crucified Christ, of the man on the cross, or of the crown of spines, he reaches out to the idea of betraying the enemy. He is capable of transferring this thought to his canvas through a crucified rabbit. He also strives to take out all connotation of death concentrating on the allegory of the fighter’s vitality. Preparing for a show in Naples next Easter, he is deep into research at present. To paint you have to jump with a parachute. Death is to find a formula and to copy yourself. Perseverance in his research, and full trust in his ability, his honesty, and his humility are the qualities he uses in his other passion, cooking. Both in the kitchen and in the studio he is more interested in the process than in the result. In any case, he remarks, he is wont to excess. I am interested in freshness and in levity, yet I always overload it all. He therefore strives to look with the eyes of a child, with ingenuity and transparency.

His constant experimentation makes his work extremely diverse and hard to classify. My exhibitions seem to be collective ones, he remarks. Even his materials are diverse, as he works a lot with objects he finds and recycles. He is sorry that his work is not widely known and believes his style lacks a market. He has never been very active making exhibitions and his work is more accepted outside the country than locally. But he is satisfied for doing what he wants to do. I have always done what I have wanted to, he says, this is the spoon I chose to eat with.//




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