The most hyperactive and elephantine exponents of the art of the present cannot but fall under the suspicion that they induce in the spectator the proportional appearance of an exactly opposite sign. The spatial and scenic gigantism generates a pygmy gaze; acceleration, paralysis; cumulative fervor, lack. On the contrary, by taking shelter under the artificial, but imperious and subjugating effect of lethargy and taciturn immobility, Verónica Gómez manages to inject into those who approach her taxidermic creatures no opposite reaction but rather a sweet drag, an improvisation of hypnosis and sleep with graphic tools. The veil of an empathetic hibernation falls over us, a breath of pasty perceptual slowness. The delicate effluvium of a pencil with a spirit of iron imposes on us, stopping us with the atavistic physical weight of an invisible hand, the need to remain still and submit to the alert time of deep attention. For a long moment, in the unexpected inaction that assails us, its stuffed characters seem like our own family portraits, lost and rescued from the attic of consciousness.

The beautiful, highly sensitive texts by Julián López are, each one of them, a kind of little prose lyric poem outlined to establish the territory of a tiny geography, psychic and experiential. And they establish a first person who is the same and different, step by step, phrase by phrase. That voice that speaks in each case, to immediately shut up and speak again in the next season, in the next pregnancy, of this chimerical journey, is a voice imbued with the mysteries of the landscape, of the appearances of the spirits that hide in the silent animistic elegy of the woods and the sky.

Meanwhile, the ghostly ladies that emerge from within that false mirror that is the watery grisaille of the drawing seem to have already spoken, and they are waiting who knows what, with features that hint at some burdensome turbulence, melancholy, resignation.

At the same time, an insistent and sickly conversion irrevocably undertakes them, and we begin to see how they are transformed: now they are stone virgins, tree women, moss masks, deities with skin and epidermis of lichens, death masks, versions of daguerreotypes facing each other. by some amateur copyist, embalmed young ladies crowned here and there with cotillion cornucopies, blind gorgons with headdresses from Pompeian hairdressers, Victorian madons with sepulchral attire and governess's rigor mortis, busts of girls and adolescents hidden in tumor cameos, pubescent girls with bird's hair or lizard with faces sometimes covered to decomposition by a bark rash, an eruptive branch disease, a hairy swarm of electrified lines that mummify the countenance under a terminal beard.

As icons of the mechanical trick of horror cinema, among allusions to the symbolist and pre-Raphaelite portraits, the legends of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and the revelations that Gastón Bachelard drew around the universal nutrients of the symbolic imagination, they lead us gropingly flirting between wonder and fear, wonder and madness, eternity made theater and the simulacrum of death.

Very few look at us, sometimes they seem to sleep, sometimes they look at nothing like sculptural traces without eyes. And then we return to the texts, to recover the breath of the story and the direction of the blog, the analog map where words and images are combined and confronted to unfold the odd phenomenon of an indecipherable and dark territory that, however, is revealed to us prodigiously.

Eduardo Stupía