MORE INFORMATION “When you think you are the bomb, the life you put into your site,” Mariscal in THE COUNTRY

“I’ve lived a lot in that corner. My first kiss with tongue. My first joint…. These houses have been the landscape of my childhood. I’ve passed it hundreds of times below that tree. How great it is, huh?, its roots have lifted the asphalt. And in that gas station, put 100 pesetas…”. The corner of which he speaks Xavier Mariscal, 68 years old, is the Parterre, a garden that opens to the street of the Peace, where the franchises are struggling to steal your breath modernist. The drawings and paintings of the designer, kept the nobility of this iconic street of Valencia. Like that reflect the monumentality of the ficus tree whose branches almost touching the neoclassical palace of Justice, where still parading politicians and hustler engulfed in corruption.

But Marshal has not returned to Valencia to show that ladio dark of his home city, which is associated with your name in the last decade, but to get all of its brilliance. “It is not that it has become. I’ve never gone. I mean, I went to Barcelona with 20 years, but I have not stopped coming. And it is not that I have had enough of Barcelona. No. I proposed and I have dared to draw the places of my childhood, the sun and shadow that causes the light between the trees. And above all, the light, and how to burn the facades… These blacks are never black, they are gray,” explains Marshal while pointing to one of his recent works have drawn on his iPad, with his fingers, manipulating photographs. On exhibit since last week and until January 5, in the walls of the gallery Nugget Lumiere de Valencia.

A euphoria of light and color explodes in all of his paintings and causes a contagion effect, especially in that to which they are very recognizable landscapes paths, and not limited to the city of Valencia: it appears a farmhouse of la Albufera, the announcement of Michelin at a gas station of the fateful road-general of Castellón, the bar Helios facing the sea of Denia…

The road of el Palmar of Valencia ,according to Xavier Mariscal. One of the paintings of Marshal.

“This road I’ve traveled a thousand times, we were racing, drunk, to the Hacienda nightclub. In the end, now we travel with my children and my grandchildren very differently. We are a species of social animals that we need to share those experiences,” he says of the winding road that connects Dénia and Xàbia by the cape of Sant Antoni, through The Flat, in the foothills of the Montgó mountain.

Among the designs, which are sold starting from 80 euros in paper copies of cotton, also slips in a typical house of Formentera. “In the background, Ibiza and Formentera are Valencia, Menorca is the Ampurdà Catalan and Mallorca is Tuscany,” says the popular designer of Cobi, Maksibet which is a blend inadvertently Catalan and Spanish, and do not forsake the tone playful even though talk of things very serious. Three years ago, declared bankruptcy, and almost hopeless, after putting together one of the most powerful of Spain, with clients in the middle world. What has improved your situation? “I’m still the same, I pursued the banks and I do not have a hard. I have problems with orders but this all sounds to cry and I cannot cry. All my life I have loved, I have very good customers, and especially many, many people and I would like to say thank you before you die, by the great affection that I have received,” he says, before apologising and heading to a couple that, as other friends and family, have moved into the gallery to say hello.

rejoins the conversation and comes in if she sees light now in the political landscape Spanish. “There is a lot more. People say that PP and PSOE are the same. But I have many friends that Zapatero has changed their lives. Right now we don’t persecute you for not being heterodox, I want to say heterosexual, excuse my dyslexia. I had three miscarriages and had to be clandestine, and so on. There are differences. That is not the pump, that we should go much further, yes, but… And corruption so brazen that it had…”. But times are more pacatos, more conservative than at the end of the seventies, when blunted with Nazario in The Viper and in the eighties, isn’t it? “It is evident that yes, but it is like a pendulum. There is a wonderful person, Yuval Noah Harari, who knows to explain how to look at things in perspective, how does anything quemábamos in the plaza of Catalonia to four thieves who had stolen from The English Court of that time. There are new generations more prepared. Yes, it may be that society is now more calm, but the conservatism is a measles that is going to happen, like the independence of Catalonia, which is as unworkable.”

New animated film with Trueba

Xavier Mariscal argues that the topics they are because they mean something, but there’s that twist like a key to judo to make it your own. And speaking of the light in Valencia is an inevitable reference of Joaquin Sorolla: “You realize your influence, and also of the Pinazo, but after making the drawings. I do not, I am not to the socks of these teachers… But Sorolla would be terrific with the iPad. Would do wonders, as Hockney, putting filters. The light in Valencia is very similar, for example, to Los Angeles. It is vibrant, bestial. I just made a travel book for Louis Vuitton Los Angeles. The valencian landscape strip to the street. It is a landscape optimistic, as a Shoemaker,” he says with irony, the designer is preparing another animated film with Fernando Trueba, after Chico and Rita. Just pointing out that the action is taking place in Brazil, but did not go into more detail until you have tied all of the financing.