Alguien Que Debí Haber Conocido

Lucila and Lucila never got to know each other. It remains questionable whether Lucila would have liked Lucila and vice versa. Even though Lucila will swap her black hair for brown and Lucila‘s dark eyes for light ones, their lives are intertwined, interwoven and Lucila carries

everything of Lucila within her, without Lucila knowing that Lucila would ever exist. Many years

and a whole ocean between them separate the two. I imagine that my grandmother, who never knew she was my grandmother, was a surrealist painter. She would have spent the nights when her eleven children were asleep and my grandfather was away, painting pictures at a small table and writing letters to Frida and Remedios (the two other great painters in South America of her time). She painted these pictures on thin paper so that she could hide it under her mattress. The only evidence of her activity had been the small crumbs of paint under her fingernails mixed with dark dirt, but who had had time to pay attention to Lucila‘s hands back then.

Lucila paints these pictures for her as yet unborn grandchildren, whom she will meet, as if she already knew that she would die far too soon in a car accident. She paints what she sees every day, her memories, her hopes of getting to know them, of conversations in other languages, of spirits that visit her. In her paintings she tells of the Colombia of her time, of the mountains and the sun she sees every day, of birds and of the forces from which she must flee.her paintings have never been seen, by any pair of eyes, no one knows of their existence. Only I, who never spoke to her, know of them, although I have never seen them. So I draw her pictures. What I carry of her in me remembers her pictures. Maybe I mix up motifs, maybe I don‘t remember everything, maybe I think of something (or everything), maybe she

painted my drawings, but her pictures exactly the same.That‘s how we get to know each other, because we should have gotten to know each other in reality.Maybe my body is her

house, because the nameplate has remained the same: Lucila

ALGUIEN QUE DEBí HABER CONOCIDO
Coloured Pencil on Paper, 29,7 x 42 cm, 2023