With a relatively unremarkable childhood, studies as an industrial expert in a provincial town and a job as an electricity meter salesman, the life of David Vallès (Barcelona 1946-2023) seemed relatively safe from the religion of art. But no matter how many precautions one takes, sometimes conversion is inevitable.

His was a late but fulminant one. After a jealous husband kills his mistress, he closes all his businesses, moves to the most remote part of the country and declares himself a painter. Exiled in a tower in a tiny Galician village and surrounded by an almost perfect solitude, he embarks on his artistic adventure without resorting to schools or manuals. He knows nothing about art. Or rather, the only thing he knows is that he must be faithful to the credo of Groucho Marx, his adolescent hero: «Well, art is art, isn’t it? Although on the other hand, water is water, and east is east». In other words, one knows nothing about art and everything is a fraud. He doesn’t know about composition, he doesn’t know how to draw realistically, he doesn’t even know how to use the necessary tools for painting, but it doesn’t matter: he leaves knowledge to professors. Somehow he senses that almost everything about painting can be learnt in a week, with no more help than his own conviction.

He does not learn at the academy, but he learns. He has no teachers, but he has masters: Pollock, Kandinsky, Dubuffet, Chagall, Poliakoff, Klee, Delaunay, Heron, Baselitz, painters he has seen on business trips to Paris and whose books he has collected with hagiographic devotion. From them he learns a taste for abstraction, which for him is a taste for freedom. Abstraction is the key that allows him to free himself from the chains of figuration and classicism. But abstraction is also a declaration of independence from reality understood in a simple way, the first step towards an understanding that everything is possible – even forgetting one’s own sentimental wounds.

Everything is possible. The simplicity, the radical nature of the idea fascinates him. It is as if in it he rediscovers something he has always known but never dared to confess. And once he recovers this insight, he never forgets it. Thus, even if in this early period his paintings remain thematically rooted in the circumstances of conversion – the couple, love, the home – and his style is close to that of his masters – above all Miró, Chagal and Klee – there is already something personal in them, even if this something is timid and almost imperceptible: a germ of the sense of humour that will dominate his later works, an incipient inclination towards nonsense. Anything is possible! This will always be at the heart of his artistic temperament: irony, unreality, laughter at the absurdity of existence, an intuition that things can always be seen and represented otherwise.

The years go by… He delves deeper into the mystery of abstraction and even learns a little painting. Finally, once he feels he has inhaled and exhaled through his masters, he gives himself permission to be himself. How? Quite simply: he invents an indecipherable language and spends five years writing texts that nobody can understand. Some painters create, metaphorically, a language of their own. He decides to take the metaphor a little further and create an entire language. Little by little until, with the help of the symbolic forces of Kandinsky and Miró, he composes an alphabet of ideograms: signs formed from sometimes arbitrary, at others times human or astral forms. Together, these symbols form a language that is almost archaic in appearance, venerable, or which would be venerable if it were not all a joke, a kind of belated homage to Groucho Marx.

Once he has the language, he begins to write text after text, which he refers to as «letters». To whom does he write the letters, what does he say in them? That’s the whole point of these letters: they are simply letters, just as art is art and east is east. Letters are letters, and a letter that expresses something is interesting, but an incomprehensible letter is divine. Letters are, above all, opportunities to enjoy his private language, an alphabet that even he is not sure he understands, but which amuses him. They might express something, but no one knows what: they are flashes of communication from a mute person to a deaf one, a form of supreme visibility in the most impenetrable darkness. A universal symbol, a critique of human communication? Perhaps, or perhaps not. Maybe they are simply the laughter of a humorist with a penchant for painting.

After producing several hundred paintings and accumulating years of a more or less wandering existence, he experimented with what is usually called «settling down», although in this case the term is not entirely appropriate. Because yes, he now lives with his family and has a more or less ordinary job again, but his head is still flying through the sky of the absurd. He no longer has time to go to the studio, but in the meantime he has become an old fox, and, as such, he knows that art does not end in the studio. What he has learnt is that art has nothing to do with the studio, nor with his paintings, because art is neither a place nor a thing, and much less a thing that can be sold and bought. Art is an experience. And for him it is an experience of the absurd, that is to say, of the marvellous. He leaves the studio, and leaves his paintings there gathering dust. They are no longer works of art, but antiquarian relics.

Art is an experience he can have every day, everywhere. As he gets older he discovers that sometimes he doesn’t need to do a thing: it is enough for him to look at the leaves on the ground, or to observe the movements of a person on the bus. He watches as the person sits down, sighs and touches his left lobe, and marvels: what a strange world it is! At other times, he decides to take part and bring about the necessary conditions himself to rekindle the marvellous. But he has become a simple man, and even when he chooses to be active, there is no need to resort to large-scale canvases or the wasteful oil paintings of the past. All he needs is a napkin, a tablecloth or the back of a receipt to bring the possibilities of his imagination into play.

In his final years he suffers his temptation in the desert. He has lost his energy, emotional circumstances have defeated him and a nascent dementia signals the end. Friends have deserted him, his family has dispersed: it’s all coming to an end. As if that were not enough, at the worst moment of the worst day, the devil of seriousness appears to him; he is the ugliest being he has ever seen, but he is so weak that he has no choice but to listen to him. The devil shows him his dire prospects and explains in a solemn tone that the right thing to do would be to spend his last years reflecting on the tragic dimension of his situation. After all, life hits hard, and pain is no joke… But he also hears another voice, the little voice that has always told him anything is possible, which hasn’t completely disappeared, even with so much pain. Maybe this is also a joke, says the voice, isn’t misfortune also an opportunity to laugh? Maybe not in everyday life, in this rigid world, so stern, so unyielding, it’s too difficult, but yes, in art. There everything is possible, all the time, everything is possible! He thanks the devil and kicks him out.

With the little strength he has left, he undertakes his final artistic project: to banish seriousness from the world, or at least from his world. He gathers pages and pages of newspapers, loaded with news about economic collapse, wars, pandemics, natural disasters, politicians saving the nation, politicians attacking the nation… When he has in front of him all the gravity, severity, responsibility and rigour he has been able to accumulate, he bursts into silent laughter and gets down to work. He begins to paint over the news: the businessman who closes a deal is given a moustache and turned into a clown, images of war are given happy drunks, and new artistic movements are wrapped in a symphony of nonsense. He is too old and disillusioned to believe in masterpieces, but if he did, he would know that with these scribblings in the local press he reaches the pinnacle of his art. In his daily existence he is a shadow of life, a vanishing old man. But in front of a newspaper and armed with a felt-tip pen, he is a titan of the absurd. His acquaintances and relatives look at his doodles and find them childish, or see in them just another sign of dementia. This, too, seems like a joke to him. His peak works, despised and judged by all, without anyone understanding their true purpose. Another joke. His great works lost, burnt. Sometimes he abandons them in cafés, sometimes he throws them away, sometimes he just forgets about them. In his last moments of lucidity he is overwhelmed by the suspicion that going astray in dementia is the true destiny of art. Laughter after laughter, until silence falls.