Time and again, in all cultures, the vulnerability of life has been the basis on which compartments and ideologies have been sustained, the place from which we cannot escape and at which we inevitably arrive. It has been religions with their coexistence with artistic representations of all kinds, that have most explored this matter – obviously alongside philosophy, such that they have always dominated it and have proclaimed themselves as the defenders of hypothetical keys that provide the meaning to assume what, moreover, is inevitable.

For this reflection, the first element that the artist contemplates will be flowers. Flowers that appear in elements plucked from nature to be contemplated, as in the representation of the same through photographs or drawings reproduced for mass consumption in our world. Always good flowers to embellish life and that, nevertheless, now in Lola Guerrera’s work are subtracted or eliminated and replaced by a unitary monochrome hole which provides a vacuous space in the contemplation of the scenes in which they would appear. Flowers trapped in a bell jar, glued to a face wanting to be skin, reconstructed in the composition of a photographic image and even exuding in its own representation. In the middle of it, a peculiar Ophelia, an anti-Ophelia possibly whose flowers have been taken away from her is revealed and becomes something unexpected and particularly something that speaks in a different way with the fate imposed by a history that is already written.

All these are notes for developing a work in progress that is hard to delimit as in the previous series. The world is full of possible images and shapes and all speak of time. There doesn’t seem to be any other way of understanding the situation and not falling into the madness that the safety cabin of our home seems to offer us, the same magic cabin that always awaits us in each stage of our lives and reminds us that the way of fiction, the differential importance of things, that is, the irrational and magical way, is the space of understanding in which we can see what, from this place, we can only understand as questions. Once there, we feel it as a unique and autonomous stage that is the exit than humankind has sought to avoid falling into the definitively and uncontrollable madness of living and developing in a world with precepts that are so absolute and unanswerable. The planet melancholy never ceases to come close*.

*Text extracted from the work by Rafael Doctor ‘Lo vulnerable’ (That which is vulnerable) that is part, along with the text by Carmen Dalmau ‘Un jarrón con flores contiene un universo entero’ (A jar with flowers contains an entire universe), of the catalogue accompanying the exhibition.