Reality is the most perfect form of fiction

Twenty-seven days without a tram and flowers are growing around the rails

It is obvious, but also curious, that in order for us to say that a place is empty, we have to have first seen it full. Nothingness doesn’t exist if we haven’t first seen the crowds. For this reason, we were more necessary than ever to illustrate the absence that dominates the photographs in this book. The brain, which so often betrays us, at times does not grasp this emptiness and begins to fill those suspended bridges in the pictures itself, without permission. Thus, although they’re not actually there, we think we can see people crossing La Salve bridge, lightening their steps while that imposing stranded ship that is the Museum sails towards us. We heard the steps that aren’t there, the roar of the engines of cars that aren’t circulating, the cry of a child that didn’t walk by there that day.

They were all present, perhaps more than ever. They were all walking along those streets on that day in April 2020. They were all closing their eyes, squeezing their eyelids shut as if with this gesture they could get back their yearned-for routine, broken in a cloudy-skied spring, just for a few seconds.
The world came to a standstill and no one was crossing the bridges.

It’s going to start raining again and no one will get wet. There will be time to splash in the puddles again

Art cannot change reality, but it can at least try to change the way we understand it. That’s the first step to the future

Life is divided into three periods, past, present, and future. Of these, the present is short, the future is doubtful, the past is certain

If we have become aware of anything with the health crisis it is our vulnerability; we thought we were invincible and we are as fragile as the residents of Gernika one day, 26 April 1937, in what was curiously, stealing the title of a book by Benedetti, another spring with a broken corner like the one we’ve all experienced.
Getting back to the site of the events, we see that the light is left on in the midst of an overly long night, the light that keeps total darkness at bay, which is also needed to view the horror, because if we don’t see the horror we run the risk of thinking that nothing happened, even if we’re masters in immunizing ourselves against everything.

José Manuel Ballester had the delicacy of leaving in the scene the flower that Picasso painted, next to the broken sword. That flower is what we could clasp onto yesterday and today. That flower is proof that there may be a future in which we can live without cries, without tears, without desperation. A future where scenes that could once again inhabit Picasso’s work are not repeated every few years.

Black, white, gray, and blue swirl in the painting, accentuating the contrast, while the flower may represent the hope that a new color is born that can impose itself on this palette. Time will tell. But, at the risk of sounding pessimistic, it is hard to imagine that there won’t be more “Guernicas” in the future, that more people won’t disappear from places besieged by senselessness and greed. If we have learned anything over the centuries, it’s that we are incapable of learning anything.
Yes, we do yearn for that flower, but at the moment of truth we seize hold of the sword, and so it is impossible for springtime to prevail.

My intervention on Guernica, as on The Third of May and some of the prints in Goya’s The Disasters of War, is an attempt at bringing to the present the events that inspired these works and comparing them to contemporary conflicts. We’re moved and shocked by them, but eventually they vanish from consciousness when they feel distant.

We have faith in poison. We know how to give our whole lives every day. This is the age of assassins

When you strip paintings of their characters, you’re faced with a desolate, absurd landscape that brings out the horror in the wake of human savagery.

Where to cross the street when you can cross it anywhere?

Ballester is interested in empty places, in portraying people through their faces and reflections. His works inquire into the solitude of the individual and the contradictions of the modern world through their urban settings; everyday places are transformed into timeless backdrops where the hidden and the visible, the public and the private, the bipolar, act as factors that reveal the human condition.

Where to cross the street when you can cross it anywhere? I’ve seen you cross from one side of this street to the other countless times, rubbing against each other at peak times, self-absorbed in our mobile phones, running to avoid arriving late to a meeting. All our appointments were important, until now, when we have realized that almost none of them urgently mattered. We have postponed life until it is possible to live it again. We are trying to regain that normality full of crosswalks in which we were trying to take the shortest route to reach our destination.

The world became a different world, unrecognizable and yet more recognizable than ever

The red light. Me, stopped

Now I miss the hustle and bustle, and many other things I used to avoid

We’ll go back to the places we dreamed of going, to the destinations that have been erased from our maps

Waiting for life to get started again