News media yesterday reported that the town of Esplugues near Barcelona was purchasing the sprawling complex built there by Catalan sculptor Xavier Corberó from the late 1960s to his passing away five years ago. Pablo Bofill and I wrote about it for the inception issue (No. Zero) of the recreated art magazine FMR, which was published in December 2021. As the property's purchase opens a new era for this extraordinary place, the text of our article is reproduced here with gracious permission from Laura Casalis at FMR.
Xavier Corberó was the ultimate escape artist. He averted categorization so intensely that his life’s masterpiece, the palatial house/landscape/retreat/workshop/shrine he built both for himself and for posterity near Barcelona, never received a proper name. Nor would he explain it, what it was or what it meant. Instead, he had stories: many stories, phenomenal ones, that changed a bit every time he retold them. Ever the illusionist, Corberó saw reality as something to mold like clay—another medium he could sculpt or carve into whatever shape he fancied. He could reconcile contradictions since he was also the most elegant of men, a dandy from a bygone era. And the most ruthless. What we will call here Corberó’s palace, for lack of a better word, is as elusive and paradoxical as he was: harmonious and raw, solid and crumbling, vast and claustrophobic, timeless and tacky, an empty space that is full of life. Although he died in 2017, he will live on as long as the palace remains.
Corberó did accept one definition of himself. He was a sculptor. “It’s a birth defect,” he quipped. His grandfather and father had been metal artists, originally in the inland town of Lleida and then in Barcelona where the family workshop cast bronze for the great Catalan sculptors of the early twentieth century, such as Pablo Gargallo and Frederic Marès. He started with bronze too, and had his first works in this medium exhibited at the 1955 Hispano-American Biennial in Barcelona, when he was barely twenty years old. One of his favourite stories was that, unbeknownst to him, Salvador Dalí had found the sculptures so good that he bought them all. He would later work with other materials that were equally dense, hard and durable – onyx from Iran, marble from Almeria, or rugged basalt from the village of Castellfollit de la Roca in northern Catalonia. When one of his monoliths was installed in a corporate office lobby in Chicago, it turned out to be so heavy that the lower level had to be restructured to reinforce the floor. When much of downtown Beirut was ravaged by the tragic port explosion of August 2020, a group of Corberó sculptures was among the few things that remained entirely unscathed.
The palace in Esplugues de Llobregat, on the outskirts of Barcelona, is where we may discover Corberó. Over the course of nearly five decades, he constructed a labyrinth of chambers, hidden courtyards, and hanging gardens, as if one ant could build an entire anthill. “Everything that I have ever done can be found here,” he said of the complex of multiple interconnected buildings on both sides of the narrow and winding Carrer Montserrat (Montserrat Street).
From outside, the vast edifice could not be more inconspicuous. Most exterior walls are covered in ivy. The entrance doors are small and discreet. Corberó made sure that the scale and complexity of the place could not be perceived unless one was allowed inside. But beyond the threshold, it quickly becomes humbling and disorienting to wander through the grand spaces, many of them magnified by mirrors and distorted perspectives that blur the visitor’s usual points of reference. The unfamiliar experience leads to a feeling of loss of control, exactly as Corberó intended. In his palace, he was the only one in control.
Just as almost none of it can be seen from the street, there is no attempt inside at a visual relationship with the surroundings. It is a self-contained world, like the patio-centered houses of Roman and Arabic Spain that were among its inspirations. The only exception is an opening towards the garden of a nearby Dominican monastery with its tall, beautiful cedars. Climbing to the upper floors, one gets expansive views of the mountains and the sea, but Corberó rarely venture to visit either, preferring instead to enjoy the domain he had himself created.
Corberó’s architectural practice was that of medieval cathedral-builders, who did not distinguish between design and actual construction. He would wake up in the morning and figure out a new arch, a new space, something else. He lived in a minuscule part of the complex. The rest he might occasionally call a museum, a hotel, a bunch of apartments, a spa for the mind, or a poem, depending on which day you asked. His favorite ways of occupying it were to give a tour to a dazzled passer-by or chat with the workers who were busy trying to complete the incompletable. His fantasies are beneath every architectural layer, in every corner of the endless maze of arches and staircases to nowhere. Optical illusions, Escher-like false repetitions, mischievous twists in the geometry are everywhere. He had an exquisite sense of scale, arguably the key to all he did. “Scale is everything,” he loved to say. Or in a rare expressive moment: “if you get the scale right, space stops being space to become mind. And this happens in a sculpture just as it happens in architecture.”
Corberó’s dream of Esplugues began to materialise in the late Sixties. Until then, he had lived a high-Bohemian lifestyle, winning more and more awards for his sculptures, befriending the likes of Dalí, Miró or Matta, spending time in New York, building relationships with wealthy clients in Mallorca, on Wall Street and in Hollywood. But he never became one of them, an art star who embraced the high life of the super-rich. To be sure, he had seen the world, and he kept his prodigious powers of charm to the end. But he would increasingly dedicate himself to his house and its hidden, fantastical universe. He would spend money whenever he got it and never save. In any case, it was his sculptures that anchored him: they were his monetary reserves, his means of exchange, and quite conceivably his unit of accounting. If money got tight he could just sell one, and create another, as needed. Corberó produced his wealth from metal and stone in his studio, which was quite literally an alchemist’s laboratory. He was also wise enough not to devalue his currency.
By the time he settled there, Esplugues was an industrial suburb with a characteristically Catalan mix of small-scale agriculture and light manufacturing, in the Southern foothills of Collserola Mountain that dominates Barcelona. Corberó started to acquire (he would later say that he “occupied”) a potato farm and other plots and houses on the slopes bordering Montserrat Street, some of them connected since ancient times by underground tunnels; the name Esplugues means caves. That soil was rich with history and memory: two of the houses he bought on Montserrat Street, Can Cargol and Can Bialet, are now protected as local cultural heritage. (Can is “house” in Catalan.) The Dominican monastery next door keeps trophies from the sixteenth-century battle of Lepanto. The way he used to tell it, he had simply showed up, moved in, and started building. He unsentimentally tore down some of the existing houses to free space; he didn’t bother with permits.
His expanding compound soon attracted a steady stream of creative visitors, many of them for extended stays. As a New York Times article described it in 1973, artists would “pop in from all over the world, phoning from the airport to see if there [was] a free bed.” Whenever he ran out of beds, guests bunked on an enormous, carved billiard table (“it sleeps six,” he told the Times) or down in the dirt-floored potato cellars that snaked beneath the studios. Joan Miró’s etchings were produced there, as was the silver and ivory jewelry of Elsa Peretti, who joined Corberó’s commune as an Italian socialite and emerged as a recognized designer.
Corberó was born in Barcelona in June 1935, in a bourgeois environment of comfort, culture and optimism. His father had been involved in the development of the Barcelona Futbol Club, the local community’s pride that is now a global icon, and co-founded the Massana arts school, which Corberó would later attend as a teenager. But the Spanish Civil War erupted when he was barely more than a year old, and his family’s world suddenly disappeared. Corberó used to tell the tale that the first word he uttered was “bomb.” His early childhood was grim. His mother (named Montserrat, like the Esplugues street) died giving birth to a younger brother, who succumbed to smallpox shortly afterwards. His father was absent, on the front fighting for the increasingly desperate Republican regime and later imprisoned by the Francoist victors.
As he grew up, art became his ticket out of the oppression and tedium of Franco’s Spain, which he summarized as “no food, no books, no films, no nothing.” Barcelona’s established arts community, both stuffy and suffocated by the regime, was not for him. He would hang out with drug addicts and drifters, or spend time with outcasts from Barcelona’s Roma community. He liked to pretend to be a gitano himself, and people would believe him because he really knew how to dance, from flamenco to everything else. Our connection to him also dates to this period. Among Corberó’s anti-Francoist friends was the slightly younger Ricardo Bofill, who was father to one of us and mentor to the other. Ricardo’s father Emilio, himself a respected architect and builder with a rebellious streak, had worked with Corberó in the early stages of his Esplugues construction odyssey. Corberó’s only daughter Ana, an accomplished visual artist on her own, married Nabil Gholam, a rising star on Bofill’s team who went on to found one of the Middle East’s most creative architecture firms.
During Corberó’s lifetime, his palace was less architecture than theatrical performance. Much of the place was nominally organized into apartments, with prominent attention devoted to the impeccable marble-lined bathing pools. But these were not seriously meant to be lived in and rarely were. (The real apartments for artists-in-residence were on the other side of Montserrat Street, in Can Cargol and Can Bialet and the outbuildings that Corberó had added.) No outsider would enter the place without Corberó or wander in it at their own pace. The master would guide his starry-eyed visitors through a well-practiced choreography of sequential episodes, with witty asides, impromptu pranks and the occasional cliff-hanger. In the excruciatingly slow-moving lift, he would suddenly unleash chaos by triggering the alarm. Bawdy allusions often followed. In an exterior courtyard, where immobile basalt figures surrounded a square pond, he would flick a hidden switch causing a powerful waterfall to start rumbling above their heads, that landed with a boisterous splash in the previously quiet basin. (The mechanism was so fine-tuned that they wouldn’t be touched by a single drop of water.) He carried his cumbersome chain of keys like a medieval lord in his dungeon.
Most spaces are populated with objects that Corberó had either collected or created, and each object had its own story that only he could tell – sometimes it was an anecdote involving a real person (whether the anecdote itself was true or not remained open-ended), at other times it was the invented life story of the object itself. He gave most of his sculptures nicknames and attributed powerful emotions to them. (Names he gave to a set of basalt giants loosely inspired by chess pieces include: Mr. Skullrich, Nessie, Rocinante, Monsignor Triangle, Her Majesty the Queen, Mr. Cochise, Mr. Empty Head, Miss Capicua.) Some of the works are explicitly figurative (though never naturalistic), others are entirely abstract, and many are somewhere in between. After being given the tour, it was impossible to think of any of them as not having complex inner lives of their own. At one end of the Esplugues compound, in an open-air courtyard, the larger-than-life semi-figurative basalt shapes look like they’re quietly conversing, exchanging the latest gossip and old memories under the trees. He joked, “A sculpture is like an unwelcome brother-in-law, if he stays in your house he can bother you all your life.” In his own house, his intimidating totems, gigantic abstract balls and silky smooth perforated marble panels were the real inhabitants.
He had a way all of his own of flaunting his proximity with many of the century’s greatest artists without sounding like a braggart. At the top of his personal firmament was Dalí. “[Dalí ] would ask, ‘What are you up to?’ and I would answer, ‘I’m learning to lay eggs’,” Corberó told Alberto Moya in 2015. “I thought that was the best business of all—laying eggs. And also because I consider making artworks to be a bit like laying eggs. It’s something that comes out naturally and you just keep on going, you keep on laying.” He claimed credit for the monumental egg sculptures that memorably adorn Dalí’s personal museum in Figueres and his home near Cadaqués, on the Costa Brava northeast of Barcelona. Another mentor whose memory he particularly cherished was gardener and landscape architect Russell Page. He was also fond of Robert Hughes, the art critic, who had the supreme honor of having his own bedroom in the main complex.
Rooms were filled with Persian carpets, precious wood furniture, Louis Vuitton trunks, improbable industrial objects and ubiquitous, amazing art he had made or bought or that had been given to him. A (working) Rolls-Royce greeted guests in the middle of a living room. Other areas were strewn with old boilers and appliances bearing the Corberó brand, manufactured by a commercially successful branch of the family. “They are my uncle’s,” he would say. “He tried to draw an Immaculate Conception and what came out was a washing machine.”
If he wasn’t giving a tour, the master could usually be found in one of three small rooms. In the living room, a television would blast campy telenovelas. In the kitchen, Matías, Corberó’s adopted parrot, would periodically scream “Xavier! Maricón!!!” The fridge was usually empty except for a bottle of excellent champagne or extravagant tins of foie gras or caviar, as well as Corberó’s favorite cigarettes. The bedroom faced a serene sunken garden. His bed was piled high with newspapers and gossip magazines, and in winter, wood would burn quietly in the sleek cubist fireplace.
He maintained pockets of mock-Trumpesque vulgarity that he claimed were his favorite parts of the place. When visitors arrived, the first thing he rushed to show them was a gleaming lift (the one with the surprise alarm) lined with faux gold and faux briarwood, which he claimed to be most proud of. He called it the Benidorm or Marbella lift, and pretended it was “the most fantastic space” in his home. “To attain supreme good taste, you need a touch of bad taste in the mix,” he would explain half-jokingly. He played other mischievous pranks with ingenious lighting and half-mirrors.
Gadgets were everywhere and he always play with them. Pressing a button would open a wall to reveal a secret staircase. Visitors would stumble upon a huge collection of erotic magazines, then some pictures of him with Marcel Duchamp. Inside a plain-looking armoire you’d find a precious Biedermeier chest instead of shelves. Every corner held small sculptures with which he always chatted, while the larger ones, his best friends, kept watch.
Once he completed a room, he never changed it. It was not a place that was constantly being renovated. Rather, it is an accumulation of chambers from discrete period. He would select some carpets, some striking shirts and hats (he collected hats the way that Imelda Marcos collected shoes), some beautiful furniture, then it remained exactly like as is for the next 20, 30, even 40 years. As a result, an increasingly large expance became frozen in time, but the perimeter also kept expanding. As soon as he was done working on one space, he needed another one to arrange and style. “For me, a house is like a diary,” he said. Lluís Lleó, a Catalan artist who knew Corberó well, has rightly described the Esplugues complex as a self-portrait.
His artistic integrity was as absolute and undiluted as his personality was convoluted and, occasionally, manipulative. Any theory or systematic discourse about art, to him, was an object of ridicule. Works of art spoke for themselves, otherwise they were not art. Of people who developed interpretations of his work, he would say “this is exactly the opposite of what you have to do if you become an artist. You never talk about your art. You just do it and never give an explanation. The people who need an explanation are the people who cannot contemplate it; who cannot enjoy it; who cannot see it.” He also said: “I hate artists talking to artists. You have nothing to explain to each other.”
Corberó cared for the public good, albeit very much in his own way. In the 1980s, he was instrumental in a program of monumental sculpture that transformed the face of Barcelona. Together with his associate, New York art dealer Joe Helman, and in liaison with urban planner Josep Acebillo, he persuaded the era’s most acclaimed international art stars to donate their work out of consideration for the return of Spanish democracy and Catalan pride and as a personal favour to him; the city only paid for materials. Roy Liechtenstein’s colossal head in the Old Port, Richard Serra’s curved wall on the Plaça de la Palmera, Brian Hunt’s Rites of Spring installation in the Parc del Clot, and Beverly Pepper’s frozen wave in the Parc de l’Estació del Nord all came about in this way. The government of Catalonia later awarded Corberó one of its highest honours in gratitude for his role in making this all happen. He was also commissioned to design the medals for the Barcelona Olympic Games in 1992. He insisted they be made of solid gold, something that had never been done before.
Whereas most of Corberó’s sculpted works are weighty examples of physical fullness, the Esplugues palace is made of spaces built on and around voids. One of its focal points is a six-story-high octagonal shaft that brings light to a cavernous, quarry-like basement. Some of Corberó’s most haunting statues, of pinkish marble and pitch-black basalt, find their natural habitat there. This element, to use Corberó’s own metaphor, is the axis of the kaleidoscope: much of the Esplugues complex seems to rotate and shape-shift around this empty column of light. But that would be too simple, so other voids define different expanses around it. There is a cathedral-sized underground hall, completed in his later years, accessible by tunnels that he carved into the bedrock like Egyptian hypogeous tombs. Above it stands the most recently built and also perhaps the most iconic (and Instagrammed) piece of the puzzle, an empty plaza “à la De Chirico” bordered by irregular arcades with no apparent function, some of them suspended as if rested on invisible pillars. If Jorge Luis Borges did not provide a precise picture of the nonsensically rebuilt city described in El Immortal, Corberó has done it for him here. There is no obvious reason for the endless arches. Corberó just liked them and wanted to make more. The result is a magical accumulation of unique elements, amplified by the inevitable use of mirrors. The arches create repetitive movement, although every arch is different. While the vocabulary is superficially classical, the structure does not conform to any strict norms of proportion or geometry. The geometry of Corberó’s project is more subtle. It does not follow explicit rules and he plays tricks with it, alluding to a vernacular architecture that is not associated with formal knowledge or references. It is also very beautiful.
“When people look at a piece of art they become artists,” Corberó once told an interviewer, “they see what they see, not what there is. What there is helps them to see something else and they feel happy because they see something they were not seeing before seeing that.” He added: “That’s the result I like to achieve.” As with Corberó himself, the palace’s ability to defy simple description accounts for much of its fascination. Despite his insistence that each piece of it would be the ideal home to aspirational artists-in-residence (thus all the bathing pools), it is essentially uninhabitable. One part of it served as Corberó’s industrial-grade sculpture workshop, but it is unthinkable that anyone other than him would ever use it for that purpose. The Esplugues compound most closely resembles a museum, but it is not that either. The proximity with the objects is too great to imagine any visits other than guided tours in tiny groups. Indeed, at the time of writing, its future is uncertain.
Meanwhile, it is entirely implausible that Corberó would have thought of his palace as an ephemeral installation that would disappear with him. He was lucky, as it were, to die when he did, when the work was almost complete but not quite finished. It was an evolution, not a conclusion. He had created a world of his own, a world with its own protagonists, and the palace has continued to evolve as more characters were added, in dialogue with shapes and spaces. All the same, everything here speaks of permanence, even immortality: the hard, durable materials, the hieratic poles, the stark light, the colossal scale. Corberó managed to be simultaneously self-effacing and all-consuming. His palace, built as it is on voids – the octagonal shaft, the underground cathedral, the empty plaza, the still pond – is also a massive monument such as no self-respecting Ozymandias would have disdained. It is a temple to art for art’s sake, a temple to himself, and a temple to absence – the kind of absence that makes you suffer or wonder in silence.