Two parallel windows, a rectangular space, almost a square. I couldn’t quite remember what I had thought of in the first place, whether to wall up the windows in that room or the ones in my study. I found myself immersed in replicating an almost exact space as well as a decision. A gesture in which the large produced the small and the small the large. A change of scale and a change of place.
Closed in on itself, that room moves at a different pace, at a speed greater than what is left outside of it, than what surrounds it. Once more, in my study, I only remember things that remain still. It is not very common not to have natural light in your own study. Marta’s study is on the other side, she has the light. Someone might think that working without light helps one imagine or project something that happened, but I would say that the absence of light simply prevents seeing; or at least, it prevents us from seeing the way we would see when it is present. My colleague Mikel wondered what it would be like to paint or draw in the dark and to do so, resort to memory, gesture or lines that one had incorporated, as learned. Resort to darkness in search for something that needs light, and thus penetrate the gaze, the eye and
the body.
the body.
I make sure that the walls of the room are smooth, polished; that the plaster that remains does not spread. I remember that my friend Natalia told me a story far back in time, the story occurs in Moscow around the mid-20th century. In it, he who was the choir director when my friend was a teenager, evoked over and over again the impression that a painted sun had left on him as a child. That sun was placed on the wall of the room where Alberto Sánchez and his family were staying in the capital of the former Soviet Union. A sun that at a young age would impress anyone with its proportions and that Alberto Sánchez always told her that he had brought with him from his native Toledo.