Painter, writer, composer, publicist, with wide radio and television experience, Jaime Compairé (Huesca, Spain) won many awards as a young man and now that he is not so young has become disillusioned with the demand for specialization as imposed by the market, and has returned to an era in which mixing pigments, inventing war machines or dissecting lizards to see if they have souls is one and the same thing. Paradoxically, and convinced that the best is still to come, he is bent on finding short cuts among silver salts (a passion inherited from his grandfather, the legendary photographer Ricardo Compairé), the digital world and the most expressionist forms of painting. 

"In the month of January, 1955, I decide to become a painter. I remember the date exactly because the calendar of the Spanish Explosives Union that year was dedicated to Velázquez, and January was the painting of the Old Woman Frying Eggs. It seemed like magic to me that someone had managed to make a knife resting on the edge of a plate produce a shadow so curved. In February I was amazed when I saw the beard of the blacksmith (the second from the right) in The Forge of Vulcan. I no longer wanted to be just a painter, I wanted to be Don Diego de Silva Velázquez. This calling lasted only until March when, upon turning the page, I saw two drops of water sliding down the side of the jar in The Water Seller of Seville. This, much more than magic, was supernatural. I could never paint like a person from another planet, so I thought about turning my efforts to another of the fine arts, like sculpture".

Jaime Comapiré

"The body off balance, the folds of the clothes, the robe pressed against the torso by the wind… I am in a room in the Louvre, in front of The Victory of Samothrace, also know as The Winged Victory, a sculpture from the Hellenistic period, made from marble in around 190 BC, showing the beautiful Nike, half fire, half water, daughter of the titan Pallas, from the Estige river. Its creator is not known, although given an inscription in which the name Rhodes is found, it is possibly by someone from the island of Rhodes, in the west Aegean. As I was not born in Rhodes, rather to the south of the Pyrenees, I can categorically deny that it was me, which makes me an irrelevant creator, with erratic artistic direction, with low self-esteem, and without any hope of producing anything remotely comparable to such beauty. So I decide to become a sniper".

Jaime Comapiré