146 Books and Objects: A Meeting with Javier Lentini Interview by Elena Martínez-Jacquet TRIBAL people Javier Lentini: Undoubtedly the trigger for me was the many trips I took in my youth with my family. My father, who was a physician and a poet, had a passion for travel and seized upon any excuse to visit other places and discover foreign cultures. Between my fi fth and fi fteenth birthdays, we had been to Africa, Asia, and the Americas several times. The awareness of the world at large that these travels instilled in me was not commonplace in a Spain that was still under Franco’s authority. I recognized the exceptional nature of my experiences and these undoubtedly accentuated my fascination for the things to which I would later be exposed. Another decisive moment for me was my fi rst visit to the Fundación Folch in Barcelona. My father was a close friend of Alberto Folch-Rusiñol, a collector and the founder of this institution, as well as of Eudald Serra, his ethnologist and artistic advisor. He took me there for the fi rst time when I was only ten years old. I had never really seen Discreet as he is modest, to listen to Barcelona native Javier Lentini speak, one might get the impression that he would have been happy with acquiring a few objects and an important library, and that these would have been enough to satisfy his passion for beauty and his curiosity about the world. But when one has had the privilege of experiencing the African, Indonesian, and Oceanic artworks in the house in which he lives with his wife, Veneta, it becomes apparent that his quiet demeanor masks the fact that this is a serious collection. Refi ned and eclectic, the objects express a coherence when displayed together, and they reveal the eye of a collector whose personal adventure, which began more than thirty years ago, is discussed below. Tribal Art Magazine: A nation’s colonial past or an interest in the European avant-garde art often are cited by collectors as the reason for their interest in tribal art. How did your fascination for this area come about?
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