Angeles Santos at the Museum of Arte Reina Sofia

For me it was a discovery. I was at one of the top floors of the Museum of Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, famous with its collection, including Guernica. 

At one of the walls I see this painting where four women who look extremely real but also surreal at the same time, one of them is reading, another one smoking, one of them looks at us right in the eye, they look as if they are in a room or somewhere that can be anywhere, they look strong and lonely at the same time, the painting has something powerful that attracts you at first glance.

I learn that the Catalan painter Santos was influenced y another famous painting, José Gutierrez Solana’s La Tertulia del Café de Pombo, the meeting in Café Pombo, and she painted her own ‘meeting’, I read that an art critic defines her paintings as an example of ‘new objectivism’ movement in art.

Right across the wall another painting of the same artist, which is called ‘One World’, where women with extraordinary big heads are like they are in space and surround the earth, its shape is not round but cube this time, the women fire the stars with the sticks on their hands, some of them play musical instruments. This work has too a story. I learn that the artist is inspired by the verses of a poet, Juan Ramos Jimenez, and his verses about angels that extinguish the green stars. It is certainly affected by the magical realism which influenced many art works at that period.