Salvador Pániker. Philosopher and writer. Barcelona, 1927

Oscar Tusquets, like Socrates and a few other privileged beings, is always accompanied by a daimon, which in his case is a magus, or a geni who has a magic wand that transmutes monstrous reality into original and beautiful forms full of imagination and history. This daimon/magus, more than anything else, is the ability to invent some very detailed, beautiful fish knives and forks which are finished in the shape of a fish; someone who always gives the impression of constructing what he finds most congenial, thanks to his fertile porosity of perception, combining discipline with enjoyment. / Oscar Tusquets is a very widely travelled person who has seen a lot of cultures, a lot of the world, many buildings and many things. And his magus takes it all in with extraordinary speed and efficiency before adapting it to his own taste. It is a magus that is imbued with everything good and beautiful that the human race has produced throughout the length and breadth of its history and geography. A magus that is brimming over with aesthetic sensitivity without suffering any loss of individuality. Post-modernism? The label is of little consequence. The magus often switches languages. The magus achieves a potent recreation of everything that he finds stimulating with a sceptical joie de vivre. / As I have said: a magus. A very special magus. The gardens of the Alhambra, a half-Roman déco house, Salvador Dalí style surrealism..., there is room for them all in the controlled explosion of his joyful freedom. The magus re-invents culture out of his quintessential sensitivity, taking tradition, often Catalan and Mediterranean tradition, and combining it with common sense and impulsiveness, with surrealism and geometry. / At least, that is how I think of him.    I think of Oscar Tusquets as a powerful, extroverted animal , full of life, as someone who can be moved to ecstasy before a beautiful object and vomit at the sight of something ugly; as a man with fox-like eyes and something of the jester about him, with a sceptical joie de vivre. As I said before, he is a magus, a very rare kind of magus.