Mallorca is an island of artists. It must be something to do with having so much time on their hands.
The great tradition of art, in the north of the island at any rate, grew out of the creation of the Pollensa "school" in the early years of the last century. As with much of the island's alleged culture, the impetus for this came not from locals but from mainland Spain and Argentina, while the best known pieces of the sculpture branch line of art, such as those on the roundabouts, are the work of an Italian and a Hungarian - the hideous horse of Alcúdia and the knotty conundrum of the Magic area.
It's hard to avoid art, be it in galleries in Pollensa town or in its port, or in restaurants which, through their own exhibitions, acquire for themselves the canvas of sophistication. The Bennassar gallery in Pollensa is its own white background, grafted onto which is an interior design of minimalism and a rotation of splashes of the abstract or the Fauvist post-impressionism with which Pollensa is sometimes associated. The Llompart gallery in the Seglars square at the foot of the Calvari is a wooden abundance of every bit of space being competed for by prints. It's a gallery in which you feel you can blow your nose, unlike Bennassar's where you would fear being quarantined in its starkly pristine clean-room laboratory.
Not a fiesta passes without the programme being brushed with an opening of an exhibition here, another one there, all the work of artists you have never heard of. The fiesta posters are their own works of art, grandly announced in advance of the release of the fiesta schedule itself, like the single promoting a new album. Art is everywhere. In the towns you may stumble across some German ancients on folding camping-chair canvas (of a different variety), sketch pads in hand and an earnestly inquisitive expression as they commit to paper a town house with its green persianas, a tumble of bougainvillaea and a balcony flowerpot or two. The owners should sell image rights or if not, then engage in some surreptitious mooning.
Mallorca has not escaped the artistic vandalism of the modern day, be it the pictorial ramblings of a scrambled abstract creator or the urbanism of street art - graffiti, to you and me. The deceit of street art lies in a connivance by an ultra-liberal, social services movement of expression of one's inner caveman. Normally I would approve, but when it comes to uninvited decoration of walls or shop shutters, I am less inclined to, irrespective of the merits of what are often astonishing statements. One can at least appreciate the creativity of the Mallorcan Banksys, though quite how citizen dismay at street art squares with another aspect of the fiesta programme - the street art workshop - is a question only the connivers can really answer.
But then there is the graffiti scrawl. It may often have its own signature style, but it ain't art, except perversely as some kind of Dadaist artistic anarchy. The scrawl is vandalism impure and simple, but occasionally, when it is intelligible as words, an enigma arises. And we have one. Mallorca has a secret. Look around, and you will see that it does. The secret's out, as in that it's all over the place; on this wall, on that pillar or utility's control-box housing. In Puerto Alcúdia one such pillar poses the question "Secreto?" on one side, and answers on the other - "El secreto es sexy Nena". What is this secret? I have no idea. Maybe there is no secret. Perhaps it is just a conceit. Whatever it is, it's intriguing. It may have no merit, it may be vandalistic, but it does make you think, which is, after all, a purpose of art. If you can call it that.
* Thanks to Ben Grimley for drawing my attention to the "Secreto" graffiti.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
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