In the heart of Madrid's Malasaña neighborhood, there's a first-floor apartment on Calle Valverde that you'd never guess what it houses. Nearly 200 m2 of canvases upon canvases. Walls completely covered in paint, materials, and paintings from over 20 years are the creative journey of Papartus, also known as "Paco."
Closed windows, laboratory lighting. Whatever minimally interferes with the perception of what one sees when standing before a canvas and seeking to establish a conversation with it.
Papartus (Burgos, 1956) is one of the few artists in Spain who dares to use a pseudonym. For him, it's a way to stay connected with his childhood and the innate ability we possess to explore and create without fear before becoming adults. A painter and plastic artist based in Madrid for over three decades, his career has not gone unnoticed by many galleries, fairs, and national and international press.
"I painted like all children paint, but I took it more seriously"
They say art is what impacts you and what you can't forget. It was with Michelangelo's Moses that Papartus connected with art. A need for expression with his hands and the essence one holds within. "I wouldn't know when to say, but I've continued painting my whole life. It has been my obsession."
Papartus in his studio. Madrid, Spain. 2025
Paint as a medium
When Inés Alonso, art curator and art seeker, asks Paco about the transition from longing to paint figurative representations like Michelangelo's Moses to focusing on abstraction, Paco defends his love for painting and not for narration: "If I want to know a story, maybe I prefer to read a book and have it tell me, rather than look at a painting. There comes a time when my love was already for painting, not for narration."
"My love was for painting. Painting is its texture, when it splashes, when it cracks, when it slips, when it shines, when it mixes, what is sensuality. If painting has anything, it's sensuality."
In Papartus's artistic and pictorial exploration, there is no room for literal narration, for the predictable and stipulated."...With my painting, I don't want to tell anything [...] What interests me is the adventure of painting."
Inés accompanies him, "Well, true abstraction is about that, getting lost in the color field rather than interpreting shapes that aren't there."
Within the walls of his studio, where he almost always produces his work, there is as much space for canvases as there is for doubt. Not from a negative reading of arbitrariness, but quite the opposite. It is in the voids and undefined spaces we find within ourselves that Papartus instinctively turns to find his channel of expression. His connection with painting is such that he firmly defends the need to listen to the painting. "When you're immersed in a series and you've already done more than 10 or 15, I erase, I go to the studio and I start to see what happens. And it comes, somehow it comes. I listen very much to what the painting commands."
When Inés discusses the importance of creating authentically, Papartus agrees:
"We have all had grandparents and parents, and it's impossible to be an artist without knowing what came before. But what is impossible is to have a world different from others."
Credits:
Interview: Inés Alonso and Romina Llaguno
Video: Rosana Pérez and Romina Llaguno
Photography: María Viñas
Thanks to Paco "Papartus" and Arma Gallery
