Rein de Lege: Succumbing to the charm of Barcelona

"In 1978 I came to Barcelona for the first time, I was twenty-four years old. I loved the city. Especially the Barrio Chino with its dark and dirty alleys, its dense atmosphere of prostitutes and junkies." That landscape captivated the Dutchman Rein de Lege, then a young Fine Arts student, who immediately discovered his favorite corner of the city, the mythical Marsella bar on Sant Pau street, "with its particular clientele: people from the neighborhood, playing cards or dominoes, or taking a nap. The heated fights and discussions. Noise, hoarse voices and the television at full volume, in that smoke-filled atmosphere of cigarettes."

A café cortado, freshly served and leaning against the bar, the artist Rein de Lege recalls that place as a theater where he felt like a privileged spectator. "It was an excellent setting for sketching. Almost every day I went there with my notebook and my pencil, making notes of the local fauna. I came home with a lot of drawings that I still keep."

The regular is not the first painter in his family. His grandfather, Arie Borel, to whom he was very close, was already one and encouraged young Rein to try his first drawings. At 16, he enrolled in the Rijks-Academie, where he studied classical drawing and painting until 1975. After two years wandering the world, he completed his training at the Academie Minerva in Groningen. In addition to drawing and painting, he focused on graphic arts: engraving and lithography. It was the beginning of a career that has led him to exhibit and sell in galleries around the world.

"In 1988 I returned to Barcelona and, directly, I felt so comfortable here that I made the decision to stay and live." The city had bewitched him and there was no turning back.

A gift from destiny

Newly settled in that pre-Olympic and largely unknown city where he still knew no one, Rein de Lege moved into a small attic with a terrace in the Gothic Quarter, when it was not, exactly, a luxury. "I started doing portraits and caricatures on Las Ramblas, it was a way to earn money that worked quite well for me, but it wasn't something I liked too much." Many hours on the street to portray tourists and passers-by in exchange for some money. A subsistence job insufficient to satisfy Rein's creative appetites.

"Everything changed one day when, walking down the street, I met a friend who showed me a newspaper ad for a modeling agency looking for new faces and to which she was heading. I accompanied her and they took some photos of me too. A short time later they called me for a casting. I did it and they picked me for a TV commercial. It was something totally new for me, and with this a new stage began! For more than fifteen years I appeared in a lot of commercials, either as a model or as an actor. A fairly simple, fun and very varied job, with shoots inside and outside of Spain... even in Santo Domingo. Suddenly I had enough income and available time to continue as a painter with my own workshop".

---What a gift from destiny!

---Yes! I experienced it as a joke of destiny, in good taste and very well paid!

In that context, Rein de Lege became part, in the 90s, of the association of Pintores del Pi, "a group of about forty artists who had organized themselves in the early 70s, to be able to exhibit and sell their works of art, every weekend, in Sant Josep Oriol square".

The city where dreams come true

For the parishioner, Barcelona is the place where his dream came true, "to be an artist, capable of living from my art", although the beginnings were not easy: "there was not much interest from the local public and I sold very little". Thus, until one day a young American couple passed through Sant Josep Oriol and came across his work.

"They owned an art gallery in Ketchum, they liked my work and bought several paintings from me to exhibit and sell them. Things went well and shortly after they asked me for more works. Thus a professional and friendly relationship was established". From time to time, the couple organized an exhibition of Rein who traveled to Ketchum regularly. "For years many of my paintings were sold, not only in the gallery, but also at art fairs throughout the continent". Everything was going well until, one bad day, that marriage came to an end and, with it, also that of the gallery.

But when that moment arrived, Barcelona was already one of the main tourist destinations in the world and, as a result, the artist was already selling much more work in the square. "For thirty years, every weekend I set up my stall in the mornings without knowing what or who will pass by. In addition, for me, it is an excellent place to sketch the continuous spectacle of all kinds of people who wander around there".

Now distanced from the world of castings and focused exclusively on his art, the painter now spends long and uninterrupted seasons alone in his studio, in Vilanova i la Geltrú.

---But you don't lose your connection with Barcelona.

"No, no. Besides the square, I like to walk through its streets and, sometimes, I go to Marsella to have a drink and let my memories run wild," replies, reflectively, Rein de Lege, before adding: "the neighborhood has changed and so have I, of course, but the interior of the bar remains almost the same."

Almost the same as the spell that irremediably linked him to this city thirty-five years ago.