Marshal, botijos and 'chatis' at the Dry

Javier Mariscal has transformed Dry Martini into a Sistine Chapel of the Iberian Levant with 50 works, including jugs, ceramic plates, and paintings of chatis , card players, and the thugs. The exhibition opened yesterday in the cocktail bar, where the works are trimmed on the walls like fat on ham. The event was presided over by Mayor Jaume Collboni, who in his speech dismissed the artist's complaint that handsome men like him were stealing his girlfriends.

Everything has an explanation in this city, except for Joan Laporta's job. Dry Martini's factotum, Javier de las Muelas, recalled how he met Javier Mariscal half a century ago. With Nazario and other cronies, they sold an underground comic book on La Rambla, and when they grew tired of it, they would give away the unsold copies to a dive bar of the time. De las Muelas handled the sales with his trademark professionalism. The relationship escalated to the legendary Gimlet in the Ribera neighborhood. De las Muelas fought the "garrafon" culture—very popular in the eighties—and Mariscal was with a girlfriend who ran off with someone else, "taller, more handsome, more intelligent"—he admitted yesterday—and it was at those moments that Mariscal, who had so criticized De las Muelas's idolatry of Julio Iglesias, asked him to put on " Hey!" , which licks wounds or it'll finish you off. “That's why I hate all the (handsome) guys, like the mayor, who have stolen all my girlfriends,” Javier Mariscal confessed.

Collboni denied that he had stolen any of Mariscal's girlfriends.

When he spoke, the mayor displayed a sense of humor, a value that's rarely seen in public life, and asserted that "I've never taken a girlfriend from you, for obvious reasons." He also thanked the two Javis of Barcelona, ​​De las Muelas and Mariscal, for "everything they have given"—and continue to give.

The exhibition is not a tribute to Galicia but to Mariscal's childlike, Mediterranean world—to call it a cosmos would be corny—with jugs, ceramic plates, and notable paintings like the homage to Cézanne that hangs in the Marie Brizard lounge at Dry Martini: card and pipe players, the endearing thugs—"unlike Trump, they were thieves but very good people and had ID"—and some young women sitting at the bar that the artist described as "chatis," an eighties term that, alas, never entered the Royal Academy's dictionary.

All the works are for sale, and if you're saving up, I recommend buying a botijo ​​(280 euros), a traditional object that's also a precursor to the popular water containers used to save the environment. And it's sure to be a hit as a gift for long-lost girlfriends!