I will not tell you that it always happens, because it would feed the same falsehoods that bore us for decades.

Instead, we praise the honesty when tortured (Giordano’s eyes consumed by fire). The rectitude that we wish it could shaped us, often vainly, but you relentlessly chase in the course of your long studio days against industrial windows … From which you sometimes manage to draw unsheltered skies suddenly rendered as vulnerable. Showing and reflectin us in your oils, the same birds under endless storms.

I will not tell you that it always happens, but oftentimes.

Niobe, Gretchen and the punkish Gioconda and other lurking silhouettes barely let you drag them from the shadows from where you summon them. They refuse to leave their reign of darkness.

But certainly this time you have ensnared them in a dizzying palimpsest of gestures and winding landscapes between the corners and walls of that Casa 27, where someone opened the door allowing us to peek in. Briefly, sometimes gruesomely.

Across the flood of media and everyday images that they keep on selling us, and that we continue selling to ourselves. A silhouette outlined in the rain. We see him hunched over by the weight of centuries and burdens. Or perhaps mischievously enjoying the trappings of his boundless memory. Like a patient craftsman from the Middle Ages or halfforgotten but insurgent scribe that the barbarians will not forgive. With the same cunning of the “cortadillo y rinconete”’s descendants, letting his life and sight diminish little by little, almost without noticing, in the exquisite brushes that testify the many years of his sworn eternal love of these endless remains of the shipwreck.

The oily parade he keeps dismembering with bites framed in the seductive paintings he offers us. Always unvarnished in their oddness these characters he presents us like a ventriloquist, bespeaking of a refusal to be insistent as vacuous.

Forever they’ve been dragging their barren landscapes as the mercilessly chained Sisyphus does, and they know that they will never be forgiven. Daring or challenging us, restrained mostly but occasionally truculent. We acknowledge it by the way sterility hunts them down through devastated backgrounds, in the temporary rooms were they become eternally anchored.

What they whisper they ‘ve been saying for a long time now… “Awake your sleeping soul and remember that any bygone time soaring over us we must consider …/ Despierte el alma dormida y recuerde” .  Then breaking off with malicious twinkle, perhaps sarcastic, perhaps challenging,   seductive or indifferent. Suddenly aware of being dragged again by the river of time that leads us all further.

 

Speaking the truth, sometimes occurs,

And when revelation unveils, often it will find you there in your sentry post indicating us the glimpse down the river. Dear virtuoso  and friend, Espen H (brother in search of floods and witches, a true master of lightning).