IA: What's your opinion of CG and realism?

J.S. : I appreciate realism because it makes a film or work of art more familiar and it can help me in understanding it, but I don't base my criteria on this. I don't believe that realism should be the most important goal to reach for an artist, I think an artist has to interpret reality and make it his own reality and show it to others disguised in his language, in that the beauty of the art resides. When we can watch the same thing and come up with a thousand different interpretations, and not one of them has to be better than the other and at the same time all can be equally enriching.
The art is in the artist, not in the reality that surrounds him. The more a work is the exact copy of reality, the further it will be form having the magic of art.

IA: The old houses that you have depicted are full of memories, what makes you so passionate about old houses?

J.S. : A house has a fundamental part in the life of a person and of a family. Often we look at our house or even our car with affection, even when we have been away from it for many years. An old big house seems to keep the echo of the families that have grown up and died behind its walls and on the outside the house shows the marks that time has left on it. All of the things that the building suffers over time grant it a strong character and that is what I like about old houses.

IA: Do you believe that we can sense what kinds of people are living in those houses just by the physical shape in the scene? Is it difficult to use those elements as words to tell your stories?

J.S. : I think that the small details that adorn the scene can give us many hints about who the people are that live inside. The curtains of the windows, what is on the balconies, what there is on the roofs, but in fact the interesting part of an old building is not the personality of its inhabitants, but its own personality. The building is born, it grows, ages and dies and during that whole process it is loved, spoiled and often missed.

IA: You did portraits that depict ordinary women’s faces, but they are very beautiful. This is the same tendency you have to depict everyday life elements; like the old houses and the other scenes you have done depicting shops, cars and rooms. You don’t try to create superior and unimaginable girls or houses. Do you consider that as your characteristic style?

J.S. : The same as I prefer an old big house to an important building, I prefer an average woman to a top model or a famous actress. That is because the beauty of a woman is subjective and is not subject to any absolutely reliable norm. The women that used to be beautiful are fat and the women that were not beautiful before are will be beautiful tomorrow. What really captures us is something as simple as an expression or a look; something that reveals to us what is inside that person and in some way drives us to the really beautiful part of a woman, her soul.

IA: Your work Composition #4 (Picture above) is a whole life in one image. It tells the story of three generations, but without words or human presence, can you tell us more about this work?

J.S. : It is the house of an old woman that has an obese son that works in a wine factory and has another son that lives in the great city living a modern life, he uses a PDA, listens MP3’s, drives a BMW and paints abstract pictures. She has a small granddaughter that eats up the candies from the box under the television and she decorates the furniture with stickers of the Power- Puff Girls. The grandmother has enough resources to buy a new piece of furniture, but she doesn't do it because the furniture works perfectly. And neither will she purchase a new television because the one she has was brought by her deceased husband from the neighboring town on foot.

IA: What scene would like to create and haven't created yet?

J.S. : That would be the room where I passed my years of adolescence in my parents' house.

IA: What do you think you can express with CG tools you can't with traditional media and why?

J.S. : Nothing, I would find the inverse question more logical. The human being, since his origin, has used tools based on pigments over surfaces and that has allowed him to develop a powerful instinct of 2D rendering. The necessity to dominate the computer and its complex programs of modeling and render makes the path from the idea to its final result in 3D not to so direct. No one in front a computer is able to represent objects or figures until studying them for many months and even then he will be far from dominating the media at the same level that we dominate the pencil and the paper.







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