Strambotic Manifesto
by Quim Hereu

“When we are a thousand years old, we will be the same. I know that.
But, for now, the journey continues.
I once wanted to be De Chirico, then I wanted to be Jheronimus, then Delvaux and, even later, Magritte.
But now, I’m myself.
That is life. That is talent, and thus will be Strambotism.”

Abruptly, a strong smell of turpentine spreads everywhere announcing its arrival. My muses never tell me when they’ll come or when they’ll leave. I can only, as a blind and mute mole, patiently await their visit. Like the insect that, frozen, waits for the new day’s arrival and with it the promise of a sun that will make it live again.

Papers, drawings, brushes, oils and pigments… and a very white canvas. Everything, perhaps nothing, begins to make sense. A manifesto. A bizarre journey to the depths of my abysses, where my monsters dwell, my muses, my fears and an obstinate reality: my reality.

His beard was turning into a tangle of threads and fish, while his head kept swelling more and more. Something like a grid appeared, and fishing rods came out of the holes. The muses burst into the space and I imagine invented theatres. Detached from reality and lost in my own bewilderment, I let the ‘rauxa’ flood everything and I plunge headlong into an unfathomable and strambotic abyss, full of lights and forms that only I can identify.

And while I navigate through underwater depths in my bathyscaphe, suddenly I feel a hyperbolic impulse that catapults me: a ‘rauxa’ that allows me to leap the abyss that separates me from what I have always dreamed of doing, that grants me the ability to become what I’ve always wanted to be. No matter how odd, strange or different it was. It is a sensation of liberation that allows me to live without fear of conventions and excesses of sense.

The rauxa and imagination fuel the engine of my sidereal submersible. Rauxa is an ancient, bygone beast that sleeps inside me. When it awakes, everything trembles and everything becomes possible. Imagination has been with us since the day we were born.

That is why I painted it, the Rauxa. Or what is the same: the Strambotic Trilogy. To give it shape and colour, and so that these three paintings would define this new current by themselves—by their appearance, their size and their content.

I used imagination to do what I had always wanted to do, with rigor, technique and craft. I let rauxa win over sense. I let my muses return to me that cyclopean, powerful and infinite imagination from when I was a child, so I could do what I most wanted, almost nothing else mattered.

For now, time is finite for humans, and that means it has an incalculable value. Three paintings of colossal size, because I always wanted to paint canvases like this: big, absurdly big. And themes very well chosen so they would be the essence of this new current and define it: Time, Power and Freedom. Because every person should be free to do with their time what they want. A living being sees reality; a strambotic artist imagines it.

In painting the Trilogy, I created the visual part of this manifesto. It is the declaration of Strambotism, and the Strambotic Venus is its icon. Inside those three huge‐surface paintings I injected the Llegendàrium, a set of metaphors that are the keys that explain the totality of the strambotic act.

Keys that are starting points, guidelines, directives—never exact rules—so that each person can explore their own abysses, their own limits, and find their own Strambotism. Art is the mirror of our consciousness. For that reason, Strambotism is unclassifiable and escapes any intellectual cage, because it is born from the subjectivity of each individual.

Therefore, any being with the capacity for abstraction should be able to find their own art. And yet, I sense that art is not for explaining or denouncing anything, but for feeling everything. An impulse that comes from deep inside, from a place where there are no reasons or explanations, no time or space, only the need to feel.

While I continue my underwater journey in my little bathyscaphe, I give form to Strambotism and turn it into an altered and conscious reflection of the reality around me. It’s a journey without a map: a kind of voluntary shipwreck inside my mind. I take no account of prejudices, formulas, laws or conventions. Everything is possible, and the limits are those of the imagination itself, inside the universe of creation. An art, however, founded on rigorous and refined technique, almost prodigious, and on a very well‑learned craft. Painting is born from drawing.

When I finish the creative process and return to the surface, from abyssal depths, the light is back as before, but I am no longer. I have seen the flip side of the invisible and discovered that there is no return possible. Only the need to plunge myself into my abyss again, to go down again and again, until the muses decide that it is enough. I check the indicators of my “Rauxa Condenser”, which is fed by an inexhaustible imagination.

They’re fine. The gigantic imagination of when I was a child, mixed with a phenomenal rauxa that nothing can stop or control, is the fuel of the atomic engine that propels me, thus defining the strambotic creative process. Only a trickle of sense—just enough to avoid self‑destruction and never limit the creative act—intervenes in this magnificent balance. All of it, to catapult me to imagine and draw extraordinary things, then to paint them. Too much sense causes paralysis; but rauxa without a testimonial trace of sense causes the destruction of any creative process.

With the lights of my glittering bathyscaphe, I illuminate the world around me and, closed in my studio, I deliberately alter the elements and interchange the properties of things, playing as an astronaut on a lonely asteroid would when no one watches. Imagining the invisible and listening to the dull roar of madness to make new drawings. Of strange, quirky, unusual things, in impossible associations. It is not necessary to invent unknown or nonexistent forms: just to create invented theatres, weird ones, that no one has seen before.

Theatres with stories, because each painting is a story, a tale. What power I see in this! In inventing imaginary worlds, yet so real at the same time.

“We are homo narrationis,” says my friend. Nothing pleases us more than someone telling us a tale, a story, a painting. As when we were children. So then, a child cannot be strambotic because he doesn’t have an adult mind? Yes, they can, because by definition they are its depositaries. But over time, and with the acquisition of an adult mind, capable, respected and prestigious, and with the learning of the necessary technique, the power of the creative act increases exponentially.

It is under these circumstances that ordinary people can begin to do things that are no longer ordinary. Someone once said that not everyone can be a great artist, but that a great artist can come from anywhere. Like the butcher who one day wakes and, seeing he has no salt, instead of waiting for the order, dares to put sugar in his sausages, thus inventing one of the most refined dishes ever created. Strambotism tastes like sweet sausage.

I know, because my muses tell me repeatedly, that the interest of the creative act lies within each of us, not outside. Outside there is nature, of irresistible beauty, from which we feed ourselves to create our invented theatres. A nature that everyone can see. On the other hand, inside us we find our particular worlds: unfathomable hells, stories, fears, muses, creations and singularities that belong only to our imagination and that no one else can see. Everything we invent, and that we can only make visible first to ourselves, and then to others, through our own consciousness and therefore through the different forms that art can take.

The elegance of the French tightrope‑walker comes from his ability to fall into the abyss and know how to get out of it. To know how to find, in his torment, the explanations and the secret of the acrobatics he performs, rather than staying in it. That is where the key lies.

I am an analyst, a specialist in planetary trajectories. Stubbornly, I calculate the path that the capsule will take before entering orbit. That is to say, I calculate composition, harmony and rhythm: the three keys of a painting, and perhaps of everything. The result are scenes which, on first analysis, appear “normal”, since they are made with everyday and familiar elements. But on closer observation, these elements hint at an imaginary and strambotic world, thanks to their grotesque combination or attribution of functions that are foreign to them. Like a mad alchemist, I alter the specific attributes that belong to them and assign others that do not. As if the air of my studio changed state, and in becoming liquid, I could fly in it.

I sense that Strambotism is based on simple principles, distant from incomprehensible methods that confuse everyone. I observe a simplicity in the mechanism of the strambotic creation, based on few but powerful elements, which make it extremely effective.

Equipped with my vintage aviator’s helmet and aboard my shiny bathyscaphe, I sail at prodigious speed toward the epicentre of the strambotic act: there where the creative process is, the very essence of art. Like a lost astronaut arriving at the centre of the Universe. An indescribable peace spreads everywhere, and there I find the invaluable, the incredible existence of the muses. They are ethereal beings, extremely bright, indescribable because they constantly change form. They are invisible to others and come and go always at their own will: uncontrollable, infallible, precise. As exact as the orbits of an electron revolving around its atom. They are mirrors that reflect great secrets and move inside our mind. They appear at the exact moment, at the start of the creative act, when you least expect it. I conclude that they belong to each artist, who must have the capacity to be receptive to their indications, and the sensitivity and ability needed to interpret them. I sense, once more, that this is talent. Without them nothing is possible; with them everything is.

From here on, the use of inspiration to apply these indications is sufficient. Rauxa in the form of imagination, trickles of sense, freedom, drawing, technique and work make the rest of the creative process comprehensible and universal.

I see a platypus. Hectic, totally incapable of understanding a metaphor, incompetent at guessing that light can be like honey. If it understood that—if it comprehended that a white marble disc sliding between the clouds could be the Moon—it would stop being a simple monotreme mammal and become a candidate creator. But it lacks that capacity for abstraction, necessary to understand art. He who works without ceasing becomes capable, but that doesn’t grant him the gift of creativity. Rest.

I speak with the muses and we glimpse a Strambotism capable of adapting to the personality of whoever identifies with it, so that this can transmit itself to the works and, from them, to the viewer, through contemplation, thus closing the circle of creation. To understand art as the mirror that returns our consciousness to us, and gives it form. A form that does not want to destroy. I speak of a deliberate and voluntary Strambotism, which is not nourished especially by dreams, though it may do so, and which does not annul the will of the painter or creator in general terms. Which avoids automatisms and absence of control.

I speak of a Strambotism born of an act of freedom, and because its mere existence moves me and pleases me. It responds to no act of necessity nor is it a split off from any other current, forced by technical arguments or incomprehensible creative processes. Nor does it want to “break” anything: art is too scarce and valuable to destroy it and, now, everything is already fragment and memory. As an astronaut and painter I am, I have grown familiar with the legacy of the great artists and creators who preceded us, with absolute respect for their work. No one is born from nothing, and we are all the sum of what we have seen before, added to what we can humbly contribute. I am well aware of that, and this is my contribution.

Scholars and experts in these matters may one day analyse these terms. Not for any vanity of mine, but only because Time so predisposes.

Lost in my own world, I understand that consciousness and art are inseparable, inseparable from one another.

From consciousness arises the capacity for abstraction, and from that, invariably, the capacity to create. I can think, then, that the expression of human consciousness is closely linked to art in general and to Strambotism in particular.

The time given to me to write this manifesto is ending, conscious that I am discovering no unknown method. Nor do I intend to. Nor do I invent anything especially singular, but I describe a creative mechanism widely used by many authors since time immemorial, which allows, that is true, to invent the most fantastic creations. And we give it a name: the name that Joan invented.

The nobility of Strambotism lies in the unbreachable capacity to need not destroy anything of what other creators, who preceded us, have done. Because true strength and confidence come from what one does himself, not from destroying, ignoring or criticizing the dedication of others. Through this manifesto I recognise the wisdom of the ancients, the need for constancy, craft, technique and, yet, the existence of talent and, therefore, of the muses.

They say that Time does not forgive what is done without it. Well then, at this moment, I dedicate what has been given to me to nurse Strambotism and to formally found it with the creation of its visual manifesto, the Strambotic Trilogy, and this written manifesto that complements it. And I present it to the world to complete what my friend Joan Fuster i Gimpera began.

And because, in doing so, I amuse myself and transport myself to my childhood,

where everything was peace, light, and silence…