The Emperor’s New Clothes (and the Mop I Used Three Times a Week)

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I moved to Berlin in 2015 because I wanted to become an artist. Not in the romantic sense. I wanted to live from my artistic practice. I wanted production grants, exhibitions, visibility, and enough financial stability to keep creating new work instead of stacking paintings in garages and storage rooms.

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At the time, I believed that working for galleries, museums, and artist residencies would help me understand how the art world functioned from the inside. I wanted to learn its language, its codes, its expectations, so I could present my own projects better. I had already attended university seminars about how to became an international contemporary artist, but it wasn’t working and needed more heltp to build a sustainable career. I needed access, experience, and resources. What I mostly had was precarity.

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Learning to Create With Very Little

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Money shaped almost every artistic decision I made. I adapted my practice to what I could afford: paper, donated clothes, cheap canvases, recycled materials. And I enjoyed working that way. Limitations pushed me creatively and some of my works were selected for competitions and exhibitions that I’m still proud of today. Those opportunities gave me confidence. They made me feel seen. They gave me proof that I should continue. But recognition and sustainability are not the same thing.

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I was receiving encouragement, validation, and pats on the back, but not the financial support needed to actually sustain my projects. I didn’t feel capable of asking my parents for more money. They were already helping me with essential things, and they had supported every creative decision I had ever made. When I moved to Berlin, I remember telling my mother not to worry, to trust on me, that this was an investment in my future. Meanwhile, my bank account kept collapsing, and she would ask me if I was spending all my money on drugs and partying. I wasn’t. I was spending it on rent. Rent that cost almost three times more than in Valencia back then.

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The Cleaning Guy at the Artist Residency

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I first arrived in Berlin through an Erasmus scholarship. Later, I received an internship grant at the artist residency GlogauAIR, as a project assistant of a non-profit institution. After three months, I became part of the team and I helped install exhibitions during the open studios, but most of my work was maintenance. I cleaned the artists’ bathrooms. I collected dead leaves in autumn and I loved it. I kept the building clean and organized so artists could focus on producing their work. I worked just seven hours a week. It was enough to pay rent, so I wasn't make it profit while working for the non profit, but it gave me time to continue developing my own projects. And I had a great environement to keep motivated and focused on my art projects.

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The artists staying at the residency initially saw me as the cleaning guy. Then suddenly, I became the person helping them solve conceptual problems, install lighting, set up projectors, organize sound systems, and think through exhibition design. It was interesting to see how others perceived this shift between invisibility and expertise. Between maintenance work and artistic authority.

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Fake It Until You Make It

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Since I was a child, I’ve loved fairy tales, especially Hans Christian Andersen’s stories.

At some point of this experience, I started imagining a new artistic project inspired by The Emperor’s New Clothes. Not only the story itself, but the social performance behind it. The fiction everyone agrees to participate in.

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I became fascinated by the idea of “fake it until you make it” within the art world: presenting yourself as a successful artist in order to secure exhibitions, opportunities, and sales. Telling people I work at an artist residency without emphasizing how many hours I spend scrubbing toilets. The small edits we make to reality so we can continue believing in ourselves. Or so society can continue functioning without looking too closely at what sustains it.

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I imagined portraying myself wearing the Emperor’s invisible clothes, clothes that only the "intelligent and culturally educated" are supposedly capable of seeing. And I imagined curators and journalists playing along discussing the portrait without ever mentioning that I was naked.  That nobody would point out that my sceptre was actually the mop handle I used three times a week.

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Because maybe part of us genuinely doesn’t want to see it. We want to see the artist as elegant, visionary, determined, fully devoted to their practice. We want to believe in the artist as a good investment. We want the illusion of artistic purity, untouched by side jobs, exhaustion, or economic survival.

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What Success Looks Like Now

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Like many fairy tales, this story has a happy ending. Or at least, that’s the version I tell myself. That experience eventually led me to my first graphic design contract in Berlin. From there, I moved to another office, and later began working for the State Museums of Berlin, where I still work today as a graphic designer. I also work for an advertising agency on projects that align with my values, and I feel genuinely appreciated there.

Most people who know me because of my Instagram profile, probably know me primarily as a painting and drawing teacher. That’s the work I share most often on social media because I need to promote upcoming classes and make sure they don’t get cancelled due to low participation. But I also share them because I genuinely love teaching.

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And alongside all of this, I continue volunteering at Fincan, organizing exhibitions and once again helping artists install their work and continue developing their projects.

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Transparency Is Also Part of the Work

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For a while, I thought success meant becoming the kind of artist who only produces art. Now I’m less interested in that fantasy, also I've been working with well-known artists, and I have another understanding of what production means.

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Of course I’d love to dedicate more time to my own artistic projects and sell more of my work. But today I no longer feel that I have to constantly produce in order to justify calling myself an artist. I can create when I genuinely feel the need to create. Like today, writing this text and sharing it with you.

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Maybe transparency is also part of the work. Not only showing the finished paintings, but also the mop, the storage rooms, the side jobs, the fear, and the persistence it took to continue creating anyway. 

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If you’d like to see the artworks connected to this story you can explore the project here: Emperor’s New Clothes