Motherhoods. A diverse perspective Temporary exhibition

One of the first scenarios of emotional dialectics that we experience, one of the earliest schools of emotions, is the coming together of the infant's body and the mother's arms (as painted by Joan Navarro, Oriol Muntaner, Enric Marquès or Francesc Torres Monsó); and, later on, when the young child starts to walk, it happens again when the mother's hand takes hold of the child's hand (as painted by Ferran Gomà, Sebastià Badia, Néstor Fernández, Pere Torner Esquius or Rosario de Velasco).

There is a point in Samuel Beckett's text Compagnie (1979) when he remembers a childhood scene; he raises his eyes up to the clear blue sky and asks his mother a question, but she doesn't answer, without explaining why; she only "holds down her hand for him and gives an answer whose pain he will never forget". The comforting pressure of a hand that holds you cannot avoid the laconic moment when it lets go of you. The intertwined hands of the mother and child engage in a delicate, emotional choreography –the love between two closely connected beings– that also has a social content –the negotiation between them for control, the fear of loss, disdain, reluctance, violence–; it is a moral dance that will accompany us for ever.

Every mother, at some time or other, has unwillingly dragged the person we love most by the hand, objectifying them, because we're in a hurry, we're tired, or moved by an incapacitating, overwhelming fear of losing our child in the midst of the urban multitude. The hands, those folds that when they fit together, become illuminated nerves of a single skin, can become the first space for individual claudication, the first institutional pressure. This is how the artist Rosario de Velasco, who was a member of the Falange's Women's Section, painted it in The baptism, which shows a young girl being pulled along by her mother, surrounded by a crowd of faceless people in a masquerade that the child does not understand. The artist breaks with her previous figurative and objective art, and uses pastel crayons to sketch a phantasmagorical picture with stains and silhouettes.

So we could say that the ambiguity of the hands as a loving interface is used to augur future disappointments and to understand our feelings' moral complexity. The daily variations in the hands' temperature, how they are held, the strength of the grip, how the fingers move, are an open book –too open– written with two hands; so early for the child, so difficult for the mother.

Ingrid Guardiola Sánchez