For Cinta Vidal, a person who reads is on another planet. She is not interested in portraits, but in the relationship with spaces. And in this sense, her books allow her to reflect close distances and parallel worlds. A few weeks ago, she brought some downstairs – where she lives – to her new workshop. She is in the old toy store El gat Corneli, in Cardedeu, which her mother ran until she retired. So now her books occupy three shelves where she's had toys for seventeen years. Next to her are the drawings of the murals that she made for the International University of Catalonia and the façade of the municipal library, using as models the furniture of the center and members of her family, recognizable if one pays attention.
On the top shelf there are novels that have marked her, by Rosa Montero, Carmen Martín Gaite, Millás, Kundera. She loved Masterpiece, by Juan Tallón, because it talks about that world of art through which she moves without fully understanding it. She was an artisan before she was an artist. She painted theater curtains and says that she was lucky to learn the trade in a workshop, something that is currently being lost. It was that of her teachers, the brothers Jordi and Josep Castells Planas, to whom Damià Barbany dedicated a biography edited by Arola, which Vidal shares –among others– with his partner Joan, a set carpenter.
He has technical books, from the quintessential manual of perspective to the Atlas of Brutalist Architecture. He turns architecture and perspectives upside down. He drew exteriors and now he pays more attention to interiors, as shown by the paintings that he will exhibit next October in New York, at the Thinkspace Gallery. They are in the background, next to the easel and brushes, bathed in a perfect light that enters through the patio. He also keeps travel journals, in which he paints and writes what he sees. At airports, he buys books from houses. He is interested in the everyday because “when everything collapses, it is what you miss the most”. His life took a turn six years ago, when he appeared in leading art magazines, which he keeps together with other publications where he also appears, such as Landscape Painting Now, Street Art Today or Stories for Ways and Means, with an account of Nick Cave.
In his so-called "corner of vanity" he gathers novels whose cover is his work; there are those of Rachel Cusk, of Celine Curiol; one German, one Iranian, one Chinese. He is excited and he thinks it's a luxury that someone thinks of an image of him for the cover. He has books by fellow artists –by Conrad Roset or the muralist Aryz, “unbelievable”–. And classic thrillers that he read as a teenager, from Agatha Christie or Robin Cook. And Women Who Read Are Dangerous, by Stefan Bollmann. His literary prescribers are Júlia Dalmases and the writer Alba Dedeu. With it he published Capgirat in Bindi Books. Vidal had already illustrated an album by Toni Giménez, El drac de l'estany. But it was before building wacky worlds, in which characters and buildings float or take on impossible perspectives.
He recently discovered that, subconsciously, he might have pulled those universes from a book he had been looking for for years. He found it one day when he was walking through Girona, in a shop window, lowered because the sun had faded it. It's huge and she had to carry it around town. His happiness was maximum. He had finally found Little Nemo in Slumberland, by Winsor McCay.
The Nemo cartoons are from the early 20th century; he recovered them from a publication that fascinated Vidal as a child. Each story is the dream of a child who ends up waking up after falling out of bed, and is full of elements that Vidal plays with in his work, from upside down scenes to flying buildings. Seeing him now, he hallucinated. He didn't remember. He thought: "I have copied it from here." Because, in his paintings, the point of attention changes depending on how you look at them, “the brain only sees what it understands”. Her father, Jordi Vidal, invented a system by which they rotate with the mechanism of a wall clock; they are different each time. Her mother, Montserrat Agulló Batlle, is the author of Memòries d' una au pair (family edition), now she is writing Memòries del gat Corneli. That toy store, turned into a workshop, is still a child's dream.
