It is hot. In summer we like to lie down on the patio just after it has been tiled. When it is wet you have to be careful with that area where the tiles are slippery. This afternoon they raised the Pelopincho pool and put the chairs in a circle to wait for visitors. Among the chairs, all different, there are some with metal legs, which make a horrible squeak when they are pushed over the portland and others, the ones I like the most, made of wood and wicker. Among them, the survivor. The Valencian great-great-grandfather worked making chairs and that one is the only fossil remains that testifies to that fact. I don’t like sitting on it because it is prickly, has deformed legs and holes in the wood from which thousands of bugs could crawl out. But it fascinates me to imagine the hands that braided it and to know that there was an owner of those hands, whose name was Vicente and who had had two wives and a daughter who had lost her teeth in typhoid fever and lived until she was eighty years old with her gums stuck together, until a surgeon gave her back her smile.
It is largely from this courtyard and this necklace of relatives that the raw material of my work is made. My sister and I liked to sit and listen to the greats. I got myself filled of the 20th century listening to those aunts on Saturday afternoons with mate and sponge cake. Time ran slower and each small everyday fact, each object was in itself a whole universe worthy of being narrated. That’s how I became a history bug and although later I was able to put it into words, drawing was the first language I found to record those moments that pass unnoticed by pure repetition and the one that accompanied me all my life.
At the age of eight I began to study painting with Eva Banach, a Polish artist who had survived two wars. Later, as a teenager, I continued in Ana Armendariz’s workshop. I went to university to study graphic design and art direction and after a decade dedicated to raising my children, well into the 2000s, I ventured into social journalism and then, in addition to recording from behind closed doors, I began to open up questions about that outside that I could not find an explanation for.
Nowadays I continue to be attentive to everything that deserves to be told, always halfway between a smile and a grimace. Like those candies of disappointment that in the end were not so sweet.