A room full of presences

"I paint when I am alone.

It is not a retreat. It is not a renunciation of the world. It is rather a way of entering it through a narrower, more secret door. When the studio falls silent, something inside me begins to move with an ancient slowness. It does not speak yet. It breathes. It waits. It approaches the surface of the canvas like a shadow that does not want to be driven away.

Then time changes.

Morning can remain suspended in a blue stain. Afternoon can sink into a crack of gold. There are days when the canvas seems empty, but I know it is not. Beneath the first layer, there is already a tension, a sleeping matter, a small wound asking for form.

I do not paint to explain. I paint because there are things that harden if they remain inside.

I work with pigment, coffee, earth, fabric, remnants, reliefs — materials that never arrive clean into my hands. I am drawn to surfaces that seem to have lived before me: the rough, the stained, the worn, the things that hold memory without needing to tell it. In solitude, I can listen more closely. The crackle of a dry layer. The weight of a colour. The resistance of matter when it refuses to obey.

Sometimes a figure appears.

Sometimes a landscape.

Sometimes only a presence: blue, golden, silent. A face that almost agrees to be seen. A body that does not belong entirely to the body, but to memory. Some images are born as if they had been locked behind a door for a long time. I do not force them. I wait for them. I let them arrive with their own temperature.

My painting is physical. I touch, cover, scrape, tear away, cover again. There is a soft violence in that gesture, an intimate struggle between destroying and protecting. The work does not move forward in a straight line. It makes mistakes, hides, opens, becomes stained, repairs itself. What interests me is the moment when beauty stops being perfect and begins to become true.

Solitude is not an emptiness for me.

It is a room full of presences.

Childhood, loss, tenderness, exile, fear, faith. Everything enters the painting, but nothing enters literally. Emotions become colour. Waiting becomes texture. Silence becomes matter. And when I finally step away from the canvas, I do not feel that I have finished something, but that something has survived.

That is what I am looking for.

Not a beautiful image.

An image that has passed through silence and still keeps its pulse." -

Eva Caro talking late at night with David Estornell.