ES+ | No.3 | 2025/2026 “Entertaining does not mean not thinking: sometimes I think there is too much entertainment and too little offering up possible futures” truth. This has always been the great beauty of human beings: even if you insist on denying something, the truth always prevails. When receiving a medal in Barcelona, you said that artists should commit themselves and take risks. Do creators lack a commitment to society? Entertainment has been misunderstood, because entertaining does not mean not thinking: sometimes I think there’s too much entertainment and too little offering up possible futures. I strongly believe in the idea of hope. In English, hope is a very powerful word that perhaps sums it up better than the word esperanza in Spanish. Artists should offer gateways to the future, alternatives, not just narrate what is happening now, they should show how to transcend it. Sometimes we artists have become accustomed to a knee-jerk reaction to the times we live in. But our most important work is, first and foremost, to bring beauty into people’s everyday lives and, second, to offer expectations for the future and hope. How can this role of the artist in society be changed? I ask myself this every day when I walk into my studio. Sometimes I feel that what we contribute as artists is too slow to help transform society. It takes such a long time to delve deeper into things and sometimes you wish it were more immediate, faster, more urgent. As a lover of poetry, I’m always surprised that poets are not valued more highly, as they’re ultimately the ones who shape the soul of a society. But their poetry seeps into the earth so slowly that by the time it germinates and begins to blossom, their very names may have been forgotten. This worries me because I believe that in times like these, when there are wars so close by and in countries so dear to us, I would like creators, through their work, to be able to permeate society in a more immediate, more urgent way. Which artist can be an example due to their contribution to the world? Any artist who has had the ability to transcend their era is a truly valuable artist. Often the worst thing for an artist is existing in their era, their times, being trapped within what their era demands. Artists who have transcended this, from Velázquez to Giacometti, are worthy. I’m a fan of Miró, for example, or Calder. I’m talking about artists who used almost childlike elements. But these people have had a tremendous, enormous ability to penetrate the human soul and give us a sense of future, of belonging, of place, of knowing that being joyful is also part of our life and this is vitally important. Should art be in museums or on the streets? Both. Art should be in museums, in galleries, on the streets, in city centres, in natural settings, and in homes. It should be like a kind of fluid that permeates and penetrates 23