Sixty years before my birth, my great-grandparents and grandparents, all long since deceased, lived through the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, the Exodus and the refugee camps.

I grew up unaware of the shockwave echoing from this distant, traumatic and hidden family past

In my very first large-scale oil painting ,

Here I am, bound against my will to this painful past,

an image from a feverish dream that reveals itself in the opening of a sort of translucent guillotine in the colours or Spain, bearing traces of bloody impacts, its jaws clamping down on the blood-red lines of the Catalan flag..

In a half-sleep state, I do not struggle…

I consider the situation and wonder.

There is no fear, no discomfort, just the weight of this handhold.

Is this hand trying to push me down, forcing my head towards these cleavers,

or is it protecting me?

Is it the shadow of my ancestors that stands behind me,

seeming to turn towards a threat beyond sight?

Or have I lost my way in a labyrinth of thoughts, bound without Ariadne's thread, just to find myself in the hands

of a monster with unknown intentions?

Night vision, blurry like a memory that slips away from us.
A fleeting view of a disturbing scene that we don't quite understand,

glimpsed for a second in the half-open of a fleeting opening

onto an intimate space,

an image that sticks in your mind without you being able to shake it off

Lola Blaspera