by Mariana Marcaletti
Herald staff

“Wrapped up in my dreams, I fall like a spiral. Opening a book at random, a line comes out and sparks subtleties. And I fall like a spiral. I am vulnerable, I know. I am a naïve resident of the sky’s shore, I believe it all. Some simple words... some lines of pencil on a paper are enough for me to fall like a spiral,” Ciruelo Cabral writes in his book Cuaderno de viajes de Ciruelo. Next to his poem, a half-man half-dragon shape grabs its ears as if trying to hear no more and falls backwards in emptiness.

The “Lord of the Dragons” is certainly captured by his dreams and imagination: his everyday tasks revolve around magic and how to turn magic into masterpiece. “I write about dreams, draw about them, or concepts connected to them. Apart from the ordinary dreams, there are moments of the day when I daydream. All of a sudden, my mind flies and for some minutes I look nowhere and see an entire film in front of my eyes. Artists have an inner screen, like a film projector or a TV screen inside our heads. I see the whole picture clearly – sometimes, the screen acts by itself and I watch a complete film that comes from I don’t know where, a movie that I haven’t written or directed with thousands of details I haven’t created. I use a lot of these episodes for my art. Well, I am the hunter of these moments,” he explains.

If Ciruelo is the hunter, then his visions are not provoked by himself but happen spontaneously and he merely shoots and capture them. “I am the hunter, but also the instigator. Through my everyday work as a creator, as an artist, I look for daydreams – that’s the raw material I have used to write my book Cuadernos de Sueños, parts of which came out spontaneously or by inducement.”

Dream book. Everyday, Ciruelo and his family (wife Daniela, 11-year old Angelo and 7-year old Lys) have breakfast at their home in a small town, Sitges (near Barcelona, Spain), and talk about their thoughts as they watch the Mediterranean sea. In this awe-inspiring landscape, the first morning ritual is retelling their recent dreams. “Everybody dreams, but only some of us make the effort to remember. To me, building the story of my dreams is an everyday chore, like brushing my teeth. Due to the fact that I can remember them, and that I consider them, is that dreams are part of my art. Dreams nourish my work.”

His forthcoming book Cuadernos de sueños is exclusively focused on dreams, in an attempt to catch his mind’s suggestions and give them a meaning, related to getting back to the roots. “The purpose of my next book is to make people enter a fantasy world that is somehow familiar to them although they have forgotten about it. Art brings memories back. We used to share fantasy worlds when we were small kids, and they are still there in our current everyday dreams. Apart from the people who regularly watch fantasy films, or read that kind of literature, ordinary people have forgotten this aspect of life. Through my work, they can remember because they are transported to a magical universe that turns out to be quite satisfactory”.

Wonderful universe. Surfing Ciruelo’s waters, the realms he depict are populated by all sorts of mythical characters: dragons, fairies, dwarves, princesses, goddesses, warriors, angels – they all live happily ever after until humankind smashes that perfect Eden into pieces. “I underline the fact that the magical balance that used to exist in nature was spoiled when humankind showed up with pragmatism and materialism. Humankind destroyed all the magic. In the current Western society, reason annuls intuition. Scientifically speaking, the left hemisphere controls the reason and the right controls intuition: our society is based on the dictatorship of the left hemisphere. It is all the fault of science, the Catholic religion, chauvinism. On the contrary, the so-called primitive societies were aware of the power of both strengths and searched for balance”.

By expressing through metaphors the aspects he criticizes in today’s society, Ciruelo also takes a stand and suggests ways to improve our relationship with the world. “I aim at recovering the ties we have lost with the land, with Mother Nature. The real problem is that humankind is not living according to nature. My purpose is to recover memory, the sense of human beings, and make it up with nature, bringing back bonds with the magic”.
In his intention to recover symbols connected with another world, Ciruelo chooses the dragon as the main representative of his art. “I selected the dragon because it was demonized by our Catholic society. The dragon represents a powerful energy that you have to know how to deal with. All natural forces are here for some reason, none of them is more important that the others: each of them has a value and interacts with other forces in a complementary way, like the Ying and Yang.”

Ciruelo’s language. Although his words play a major part in his books, Ciruelo’s drawings are supposed to be his main asset. Still, what he manages to achieve is a new vocabulary that intertwines both words and images – when reading his material, it is difficult to separate the poems from the paintings because both communicate the same idea. In fact, they complement each other in such a way that it is hard to tell which comes first.
“It depends on the book. For example, Cuaderno de viajes (the travel book) was created little by little at places outside my studio, at airports, outdoors, at coffee stores, hotels, fairs. They are short writings, and in some cases I began with the text and continued with the drawing, and sometimes things happened the other way round”.
In Fairies and Dragons (available both in English and Spanish), Ciruelo gives priority to writing. “I have developed an intense work as a writer because it is a novel: there is a beginning, a middle and an end, it took me three years of hard work. I would write, then make a picture, it was as if images and words were inseparable. If I had to imagine my career’s future, this is what I would like to do from now on”.

Ciruelo’s language is full of conventional symbols. Thus, the armors, swords, wings, stones, feathers, butterflies, birds and monsters must not be taken literally, but in connection with signs that refer to sharp metaphors.
“I resort to symbols because they are visual elements that convey a complex kind of information: the symbol is the tool to explain things metaphorically. Symbols are my bridge between the real and the unreal. They allow me to take you somewhere, but we cannot talk about it because words are not enough. Only symbols have the magic power to condense many meanings in an image”.

Reality is fantasy. In a dialogue written by Ciruelo, he presents two characters discussing the difference between reality and imagination. One of them depicts a cozy landscape in a poetic way, dazzling the other with his knowledge and beautiful language. Therefore, the latter comments how much he likes his imagination. His companion answers that his thoughts are not the by-product of his imagination, but of a painting he has seen. “There is nothing more real that a painting,” he completes.

Speaking about this piece, Ciruelo says he wanted to go against a common misconception. “There is a common belief that says paintings are disconnected from reality– I try to prove the opposite. I try to make a painting that touches somebody deep inside, a painting that becomes a gateway. It is real, as real as dreams. So, paintings fall in the field where we cannot control things with our minds. Our spirit needs them. An image can take you to specific places much more that ‘real’ things such as a bus ride or the government. And, what is art all about? Nothing, in the physical aspect. But, in the emotional part, art is a window to another world. A real window: paintings leave you real feelings, real emotions, and real knowledge”.

profile

n He was born in Argentina in 1963.
n In 1987, he moves to Spain with his wife. He sells material for Spain, England, US and Germany.
n He painted the cover of Chronicles of the Shadow War, written by George Lucas.
n He painted covers of rock performers such as Steve Vai’s The 7th Song.
n He has published the books Ciruelo (1990), El Libro del Dragón (1990), Luz, el Arte de Ciruelo (1997), Magia, the Ciruelo Sketchbook (2000), Cuaderno de viajes de Ciruelo, Notebooks (2005) and Hadas y dragones (2008).