Spain's Finest

Ramon San Miquel is a painter who lives in his grandfather's old dentist's office, which is situated deep in the Catalonian mountains and looks like Dracula's lair if he was moonlighting as a rural orthodontist. Actually he divides his time between there and a fairly regular studio in Madrid's Sierra, but why sell the guy short. Ramon's part of a school of Spanish artists that include photographer Alberto Garcia-Alix and oil-painter Jorge Isla, and whose subjects can largely be divided into piercing artists, drug addicts, and naked girls. While this kind of material may have lost its "edginess" a while ago in New York or London, the Spanish public is just coming around to it. Garcia-Alix has gone from shooting portraits of porn stars to holding a retrospective at the Reina Sofia and joining the Spanish Aristocracy. Jorge Isla is still relatively unknown, although his gothic oil-on-board paintings seem to appeal to retired drug dealers, and members of Madrid's piercing and tattoo communities. Out of this friendship circle, (which also counts Toño Camunñas and the Mexican tatoo artist Dr. Lakra among its members), I like Ramon's paintings the best. Working in pencil and watercolor on canvas, his nudes have more in common with contemporary photo portraiture than the sometimes cartoonishly symbolic work of his peers. He also paints a great tit. Anyways, here's a chat we had with him in the bowels of Dr. Acula's old dental practice (that joke doesn't work in Spanish, so please enjoy it for what it's worth). Vice: Do you paint from photos?
Ramon San Miguel: They're a good timesaving device if I can't get enough sessions with a model, but I always try to have three or four sessions painting with the model. Like with Clementina, I went to her house and painted her there. I needed to see her in her own microcosm because thats what I wanted to portray. That and her sexuality, which seems to sweat out of her pores. How long does it take you to finish a large portrait?
Clementina's took me three months. I tend to sketch each part over and over again so I can be sure of getting it right when I move onto the canvas. Your paintings are usually very naturalistic. Do you ever add in elements to give them more symbolic weight? I'm thinking of the red blanket in the painting of Clementina…
I totally see that as blood. Ah OK, so did you arrange the shawl like that when she was modeling or put it in after the fact?
Oh no, it was just there. That was just lying on the bed and happened to be folded that way. I didn't arrange it. But it's funny, because at that point in her life, Clementina was in a really bad place. Like on the verge of death. I think I told you before that what I like most about your nudes is the way that you paint tits. I don't think i've ever seen such realistic boobs in a painting.
They're so difficult to get right. And when something's hard, I become obsessed with showing them how they really are. It's the same with hands. Mathematically, the shape of a breast is between a sphere and a cone, and that's really hard to portray in two dimensions.

You painted a friend of mine once, if you remember we met at the opening of that exhibition.
Her boobs were wonderful. I wanted to include her in a series I was doing of girls under the effect of drugs. I wanted her to smoke opium, but it didn't work out in the end. You're actually a qualified doctor, right?
Yeah although I don't practice much any more. My friends used to call me Dr. Mengele. They were joking, though. I haven't killed that many people. Do you deliberately pick models who seem to be flirting with death? Or at least "have issues"?
I don't see them as flirting with death. I see them as people who are enjoying life, or at the very least learning from it . I got a lot of shit for Las Potriyas, because people said that they were anorexic. But they were fine! They came from good families; they were well-fed. What about the girl in Tres Gracias? You told me that she was institutionalized before you could finish the portrait.
That was an unfortunate incident that really made the painting difficult to complete. But it remains an alegory of youth. It's a personal story that talks about all three girls in terms of what happened. People have all sorts of complexes. I just take them over to my ground, and show them in my way. Do you ever worry about whether your work is crossing the line between eroticizing your subjects or pornographizing them?
All doctors are sadists. Anyone that operates on another human being, is at heart, a sadist. I don't see myself as totally sadistic, but i'm sure there's some of that there. Actually, the burden that I carry around with me is dealing with the dichotomy of sinning and trying to live clean. It comes from years of Catholic repression. It's hard work, because once they've got inside your head, you have to deprogram it all in order to be reborn. I think it's interesting, the Church seems so weak and ineffectual now, but it's still got this vestigial influence over so much of our culture.
The younger people I know, are from another generation. All they've ever done is create. I've had to destroy first to be able to build. But even so I'll always have this stain. Church was always a dark oppressive experience for me. They spoke of death, and how it was imminent. Everything was, 'beg for forgiveness, sin, beg, sin, beg," and I believed that. Up until I was 12 I lived my life perpetually afraid. When I got to 14 I had to make a concious decision to use the Opus Dei, before they used me.