White Paper by - English Issue 12

If there is one person that all of us who produce this magazine admire and agreed about wanting to feature in our publication, it is Jose Andrés, not only as a chef but also for his humanitarian work in so many countries. To have created an organization like World Central Kitchen, with so many people involved, leaves us at a loss for words. I will never be able to express all that goes through my head when I see the work he does and the attitude he shows all throughout it. Listening to him speak with that ease, that decisiveness with which he explains everything, how he presents the different problems… it is as if you feel that your father, a close uncle or a great friend is talking to…

It was during a visit to Washington DC in January 2019 that Diego Guerrero began to understand the dimension of World Central Kitchen. The chef from Vitoria at the helm of the two Michelin-starred DSTAgE and the other members of his gastronomic project had been invited by his friend José Andrés to offer a joint dinner at Minibar—a restaurant deserving of just as many stars. By then, the Asturian chef had already become a first-class media figure. Not only for the success of his restaurants in cities like Las Vegas and New York or for his contagious charisma, but for a humanitarian activism that has led him to be considered one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine on two occasions. “He is a gift…

André Butzer (Stuttgart, 1973) is one of the most relevant international painters of the last decades. His vision of the history of painting and his combination of elements of pop and abstraction articulates a peculiar and unique pictorial imaginary. For decades his painting has traveled different paths, and today, after 25 intense years of career, and with some perspective, we could arrange it by periods, types or series, which despite their disparity, converge in one place. His conception of the elements of nature and their representation in painting, which sometimes respond to his own imagination, are joys of poetry and the art of man. Far from a structuralist logic or modern rationalism, vision and poetics, understood as the principles of art (its purest motifs, the search for a concrete form,…

“I am hoping to change the paradigm, push people to dream and undergo risk. It is not because you are rich that you should waste material. It is not because you are poor that you should not try to create quality. Everyone deserves quality, everyone deserves luxury, and everyone deserves comfort. We are interlinked and concerns in climate, democracy, and scarcity are concerns for us all.” Francis Kéré,winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize 2022 From Gando—in Burkina Faso, where he was born in 1965—and for the whole world, this architect based in Berlin (Germany) has come to change the paradigm of architectural practice. He received the Pritzker Architecture Prize this year and that is very good news, but it is even better news that there is someone like him, with…

The first thing that attracted Bernd Schmahl (Hamburg, 62 years of age) to Palma de Mallorca was not architecture, but the Mediterranean Sea: “I had taken a sabbatical year to finish my training as a diving instructor and I came here”. In the following winter, and hardly speaking Spanish, Schmahl was already working in a studio, thus beginning a professional career on the island that would culminate in 2005, with the opening of his own studio, Arbes. Since then, the German’s vision, strongly influenced by Japanese philosophy, has become one of the most sought-after and respected on the island. And in his impressive list of projects, Can Axartell stands as one of the jewels in the crown and the culmination of the sustainable commitment and integration with the environment that…

For all those who pursue or want to pursue an activity related to creation and infuse it with a dose of “truth”, the painter Alex Katz (New York, 1927) has an important message: he is still looking for it. More than nine decades of life and seventy decades of art behind him have not been enough to find the truth. He also has an even more important message: we must keep looking for it every day. He practices it when he gets up early every morning and every day he works, more or less, intellectually or manually, but always. Always. Daily. Each and every day. The explanation? “One always wants to go on, to go forward and I want to find the truth because the truth is a variable. Many…