About my life
​My name is Jaume Mestres Estartús, and I was traumatically born by caesarean section on the 15th of February 1949 at the clinic Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Barcelona with the bad luck that when opening the uterus, the gynaecologist gave me a seven centimetre cut on my cephalic region. My father, Jaime, a shopkeeper and Catalan, a rather dim-witted man, had very little influence on my life. My mother, María Luisa, a German from Hamburg, from what they’ve told me, was a very educated person who was sensitive to all sorts of artistic manifestations; she left me as an orphan when I was three years old, when she died while giving birth with forceps to my sister, María Luisa, who managed to survive the ordeal. We were lucky to have our paternal (Teresa Claret Señora de Mestres) and maternal grandmothers (Käte Cördes-Bockellman, Señora de Estartús), who took care of us. Afterwards, various times spent at boarding schools continued shaping our childhood. Nine years later, our father gave us the gift of a predatory stepmother like the one in most children’s stories; perhaps the little interest she had for us acted like a spring so that we would get our act together. I studied primary school at Las Teresianas and high school and pre-university studies at Los Hermanos del Sagrado Corazón. I studied Fine Arts, Architecture and Medicine, earning my bachelor's degree in 1974 and my doctoral degree in 1977.

I got married when I was 26 years old, and I am the father of one girl and two boys.

Scarred perhaps by what happened to my mother, I specialised in Gynaecology, a profession which allowed me to live to paint rather than paint to live.

I think that I am full of life and a perfectionist. I’m interested in psychoanalysis, philosophy and introspection. I enjoy being alone, meditation and reading anything that has to do with Art History.

I am interested in the human being, but on an individual level; I flee from groups. It is probable that I am not very social; the truth is that I only give myself over to the very few people that I am truly fond of.

Maybe I am somewhat introverted and melancholy, but I am good at balancing my euphoric states with those of relative depression.

I feel that I am a citizen of the World: European, Spanish, Catalan and Barcelonean, in that order. Politically, I didn’t fit in too well with a family very in favour of the Regime. While studying for my degrees, I intensely lived all of the University mobilisations of the seventies. I consider myself to be a social democrat and liberal. I don’t believe in territorial restrictions under any pretext; I think that nationalisms that exclude are dangerous "non-sense".

I detest mediocrity, laziness, envy and, above all, lies and ingratitude.

I am a believer and a “disillusioned catholic”. I am hurt that, due to antiquated discourses and because postulates unsuitable for the 21st century remain in force, young generations are moving further and further away from the church.

I am incapable of discriminating against someone because of their race or religion and even more so because of their sexual orientation; it seems tragicomical to me that there is still anyone capable of doing it. Those who I would marginalise in a ghetto are those who are lazy, delinquents and ungrateful.

It is probable that the most characteristic aspect of my personality is that I feel permanently unsatisfied, and when I transfer my personal insatisfaction to my work, the degree of bitterness becomes inflated, having, in addition, the characteristic of permanent. I would often not sign the works made in previous years.

Lastly, I would like to express my ongoing uneasiness: the velocity with which we cease to exist.

About my work
​The life of a man and the action of painting are indissolubly joined. The philosophy of life and pictorial conception are used as a means of freely expressing ideas, goals and problems. For me, starting each work is equivalent to submerging myself in an adventure toward the unknown; the most essential thing is the creative process itself. Throughout this process, memories, ideas and feelings arise, which are determinant in the final result.

The early death of my mother has always been present in my life and in my work through an ongoing obsession with death, with the unknown, with mystery and with the soul. What I have come to understand over time is the enormous influence that this event had on the shaping of my sensibility. Losing my mother also entailed the loss of the person that could have acted as an intermediary with my father; he doubted the possibility of making painting a living, so I never had his support.

The creed is the ability that the support and the pictorial material have for containing and transmitting emotions in addition to constructing the shape. They are paintings directed at our body, at us as spiritual material. They are also directed at our eye, of course, but the figure of painting as an intermediary with other worlds disappears, and the figure of painting as a place of beauty. They still exist when the light is turned off. They are there, breathing, thinking, believing, acting.

The philosophy of existentialism, focused on existential absurdness and on the search for personal freedom beyond all acquired culture and all prejudices, is what is behind my work. For me, it is a way of freeing my unconscious and inner restlessness through an often violent automatic gesture that is projected out of my work. And that is where the basis of the creative act lies, an act which is understood as a psychic projection of the artist on the material support of the work, while the formal result of the finished work is pushed to the background.

I have tried to physically feel the material in an austere and restrained dramatism, far from any rhetoric sensationalism. The smallest detail can take on great importance; it can decide the meaning of a painting that is full of twists and turns. For me, painting is a way to get closer to transcendence. An intelligent man that is capable of maximising the cold rigour of rational analysis finds in painting a way of saying, of saying to himself and getting excited about it, that man is sustained by a spirit.

On the 20th of May 2008, as a result of my last exhibition in Barcelona, in his art review column, Josep Maria Cadena published in El Periódico under the title "ESTARTÚS AND THE SEARCH FOR THE BEING” “His field is that of abstract expressionism with a clearly Catalan root and his own diction. He searches for the essences of the being and he expresses the diversity of situations that people's souls go through".

In the middle of the seventies, I went from the initial realism to painting abstractions, although with a degree of realism, yet without specific references. I based my work on the treatment of the materials by investigating textures, colours and shapes.

I endeavoured to attain naturalness and sincerity in my paintings without clinging to any sort of partial confirmations; I didn’t wrap or adorn the confirmations, because this attitude is usually deadly, since one would be confusing creativity with good work and a superficially pleasant confirmation with art.

In those paintings that only have good taste, it is precisely that good taste - the taste of a time, the rules of prevailing sensitivity - who paints this painting. This is a danger that must always be kept at bay. A brilliant painter, an artist with personality, is able to overcome this taste and create his own language, which is a process that can be complicated or less so, more intuitive or less, more aware of the context in which his work is located or less so, but, without a doubt, free.