Vanessa Escalona: What inspires you?
Bartus Bartolomes: Inspiration is always plural; it is the law of gravity itself, falling as an unexpected curiosity, mutating into an intimate message which then strives to eject itself to the exteriority of the world or the daily life. It would seem to be a authentic angelical act carrying away something of our inner self while bringing us, from the external world, the luminosity where historical dynamics dwells and loses itself.

VE: When do you think you had the first indications of your inclination for artistic life? Who were your mentors? What is your greatest learning? What do you remember?
BB: We could exhaust the dictionary by giving indications. Inclination towards any task is always an aphorism. I was born in the Andean Pie-Monte and was educated in Europe and Asia; I belong to some aesthetics with no precise chronicles or geography. Self learning is like a jewel polished and crafted by time. What Art really requires is conviction and information. What it mostly demands is constant searching and humility. There are masters who are like carnivorous plants…I prefer gardens with wild flowers which play with fire and sun.

VE: What is color for you?
BB: Color is the aliment of gods, and at the same time, a sort of optical typography undressing humans day by day…A world without color must be something painful; something like a scale-less animal creeping on a sand of lead dust. A mono-chromatic culture is not respected by the dialectics of the infinite and shall be devoured by centuries in the hermeneutics of silence.

VE: Which of the artistic trends would you catalogue your work in?
BB: Trends are like protocols. They are proposals which nearly always limit your quest, while at the same time it is difficult to ignore them. I have been quite naughty in this respect, and even published several “manifests”, among them, towards the late seventies, “Transpositionism” in San Francisco, California; a kind of appeal to what is known as “Art Fusion”. In the early eighties, in Italy, I joined Carlo Marcelo Conti, Lamberto Pignotti and Adriano Spatola in their insurgent movement known as the “Nuova Visualita”, nowadays quite consecrated by the academic critics of that country.

At this time I prefer to remain open to the innovations of plastic Art, typing in spontaneity and the new visual media, towards a more heterodox, universal culture. Above all, I do not pretend to live, like many of those creators, from the amulet of nostalgia…

VE: What foot prints do you intend to leave the day you will be gone?
BB: To leave footprints which avoid exhausted footsteps…The footprints of lost steps…
The prints which run after nostalgic or propose the immortality of the life cycles. A being living off his prints is a wrong stone in the path to creation.

VE: What messages do you leave to the new generations of artists just initiating?
BB: To avoid letting themselves be covered by the mildew of a Curriculum Vitae. That their bodies, the palette, or any working instrument follows the path of the rainbow…The poetry of life-sharing. Creation is not a ladder of playing cards which falls down every time a work or a plastic year has been finished. Creation belongs to that infinite hope which every heart disputes in a fight against crepitation and monotony.

VE: Tell us about your family
BB: I am in love with heights, being born in the mountains. I am passionate by the sea and the impossible words. My family fits this geographical emotion. Having lived in about twenty countries, I have to admit that I would have an equal number of families; it would thus require many pages to thank them for all the loving terms and secret codes I was taught, which nowadays custody my condition of a living, creative and artistic being.

Vanessa Escalona / Jornalist.
Interview for an article on art. Construarte Venezuelan Magazine.
Vol.8 No: 55.