Loc-humo
Tempera on canvas · 2025 · 20×15 cm
"Pa sobrevivir me adentré en el humo." Guitarricadelafuente (Spanish singer-songwriter) speaks of loss in the anthem "guantanamera," a song with an unmistakable Latin warmth.
The loss Guitarricadelafuente speaks of is the loss of innocence, of wonder, of amazement.
In "He vendido ya mi alma al diablo," or "I have already sold my soul to the devil," the full spirit of emotion
waves from afar. The harshness and bitterness of life contrast with the nostalgia for a purer past.
And so we all lose ourselves and sell our souls to the devil for a bit of happiness, for "silver." All of us, little beings fragmented by growth, wander uncertainly in search of wonder, in search of vain illusions, in search of hope.
And that's where madness comes in, the loss of light, agnosis, inner dispossession, brutality, violence, the shattering of reason, the loss of speech, senselessness.
Everything is like a vortex.
Madness still frightens us, still scares us, still stands out. It still overturns what society expects of us, it's still a condition that "stains us."
Yet Ariosto spoke of it, and he did so in an era when everything needed to return to equilibrium. Man was supposed to be Da Vinci's Vitruvian, and instead Orlando existed and screamed. Not only is the man invented by writers erring, but also the writers themselves. Just think of Tasso and the hallucinations of the elf, of Merini and her "companion" to love, madness.
Well, perhaps madness is a prerogative of growth, the scream of imprisonment, returning to Guitarricadelafuente, or perhaps it really is the vortex that sooner or later comes to visit us, that disrupts us and then pigeonholes us back into society.
It is in chaos that rediscovering ourselves presents the most difficult of challenges.
Equilibrium, the straight, almost utopian line, ends up distorted and confused with the vortex. It is barbed wire, it is a blade, its weave is so rigorous yet so twisted that it frightens us at every step. And so we gather the fragments and begin to let go of the melancholy. We begin to walk, hoping that the straight line doesn't also pierce our souls, that it doesn't scrape away our wonder (or, at least, not forever).
