Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Or, to be more precise

Unfortunate that cultural sphere where all the classics are dead. It is good that there are classics alive, and fortunately Carrero is one of them. A classic made of concrete matter, present, and also of nostalgia, ghosts and dreams. I am fascinated by those textures of women’s flesh reflected in a tile, next to the cracked photograph of what they once were; or rather of the women who made them possible, forming the mysterious genetic chain that led to them. Or, to be more precise, until Ella. I am intrigued by those wise feminine gazes, forged in speaking for centuries the language of silence. Centuries of watching, of waiting, of being hostages, of weaving tapestries or of being booty in the bilges of black ships that came and went between Ithaca and Troy. To give birth to children and bury them. Of forging solitude, and serenity, and courage. I am also attracted by those other apparently everyday objects that suddenly, out of their context -or perhaps returned exactly to it- take on the content of a key, an explanation of life, a symbol for the very enigmas of those who contemplate them. the cleanly drawn flower, the fruit, the glass, bring back to me smells, tastes, sensations of the only real homeland, which is the bittersweet memory represented in a frame without a photograph, on a forgotten ribbon, in a crack in the wall. Perhaps these are the reasons why I have learned so much about women, life and memory in Carrero’s canvases.

Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Writer and Journalist