“The first time I saw Luis Claramunt, in around 1984 or surely a bit before then, I did not know who he was; he was just a fellow with a strikingly unique appearance, shirtless, dressed in black, with the look of a flamenco guitar player or singer, seated at the table with our mutual friend Fernando Huici, in such a typical place as the Cervecería Alemana in Madrid’s Plaza de Santa Ana. I thought to myself: “Is Huici organising flamenco events now?” I immediately realised that no, this fellow was a painter, and one of some consequence, and that on top of that he was not even a gypsy but born in Barcelona’s Ensanche district, the son of a decorator and a pianist – I actually learned about his parents much later, by the time the painter was already deceased – and educated at the French School. A fan of living dangerously, he had taken to that world so much that he actually blended in with it. Later, I met him and interacted with him, although much less than Huici did, or Quico Rivas, whom I shall soon discuss. I remember his implausible home studios, especially one he had in Seville, in El Arenal near the Maestranza, which he shared with Teresa Lanceta and her loom. I got a team from Televisión Española in there one morning, and they made me promise that I would never take them anywhere like it again. And yet I remember, at the other extreme, his literary interests, his passion for a certain kind of French literature.”

Juan Manuel Bonet (Abstract from his text for the exhibition catalogue ‘Luis Claramunt: Notes of a Siege’)