”ABDUCTED REFLECTIONS”
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Explanation “A”
 
“Make it seem like an accident.” I was the Godfather. I was also the hitman in charge of liquidating that fellow. White his name was. Without raising suspicion. I'm not very loquacious, I avoided asking myself uncomfortable questions. Just one: “Any way I want?” “Yes, but not a clue.” No smoky backgrounds, I'm familiar with those. They would identify me. Neither a blast of agile pencil strokes. I sent a dozen canvases to the other side with this technique. Atacking the paiting by shooting any iconography at it point blank would also betray me. I decided to cut to the chase. I'll cover up the crime with another crime. A background would have to be painted that wouldn't be noticed. And that is what I did. I tore off other fabrics and glued them on top. They were printed. Or stiped, I don't care. In any case, they were painted. I had a background. And that loser, the White of the canvas, buried. There wasn't even a corpse. Perfect Crime.
 
Explanation “B”
 
Madrid, mid-eightties, the home of my grandmother with all her sisters in law, all of them dears and all of them widows or spinsters – although not of marriagable age -, plus all the service personnel, who were also worn-out, and yours truly, who at that time was finishing fine arts. Except for the odd glorious incorporation that lowered the average age of the domestic body considerably (and the tenant population in general), I was the only inhabitant in those 500 square meters who didn't take little pills for breakfast or read the ABC, which was like their Times Out, with its many obituaries and subsequent plans. I was also the only one who shaved, lacked a pension for whatever concept imaginable and who didn't wear either a bag, mourning, or a rosary. Even so our coexistence was harmonious, because they were Saints and yours truly was always painting in the boxroom, which was my studio, and furthermore I have good manners at the table, it has to be said.
One fine day, while I was smoking a cigarette searching for inspiration from among the nooks and crannies in the gloomy corridors, or behind the curtains that camouflaged the altar – not to be scrimped on – where Christmas Mass and other events like funerals or such were celebrated, I noticed an object that shone with tedious solemnity on a prie-dieu that was tucked into a corner. As I am a busybody by nature, but especially because I was super bored that morning, I made the most of the deafness of some, and the not very vertiginous speed of others, as well as the absence due to communion-taking of the rest of staff, and nicked that mysterious and brilliant object, tucked it under my shirt and with it hidden there, covertly made my way to my studio, at the other end of the house.
Once there, and safe from indiscreet glances, I discovered that the booty I had in my hands was a crucifix. It was stuck to a passepartout of balding velvet, and lay encapsulated under a convex oval shaped glass. The set couldn't be more hideous, however, it was submergible. I never checked this fact by launching it to the bottom of the bathtub, but I assumed it had been the intention of its pious designer: Make it resistent to the onslaught of any kind of meteorological situation, including seaquakes in Madrid.
I succumbed to temptation and painted it. Not once, but twenty-odd times. I made a whole series of paintings of almost two meters by two meters which I baptised “Submergible crucifix”, and each of them had its consecutive number and annotation: “... in a printed interior”, “... overexposed”, “... but it fades”, etc., etc., etc.
Anyway, in conclusion, and get to the point I was trying to make: The Explanation of the iconography of paintings here reproduced. Well it turns out that they all had in common, apart from the more or less interpreted crucifix, a kind of amoeba, generally in light tones, which summarized schematically the reflection that the light created when it hit on the beveled edge of this oval and protective glass (although I never verified if it was waterproof).
In the following series of paintings that I made (the one I comment here), the protagonist was that reflection, “kidnapped” from the preceding paintings, but now without crucifix, passepartout, glass or tsunamis, although always superimposed onto a mattress fabric, “toile de jouy”, or damask, or whatever I could lay my hands on there or from containers.
And that is the Explanation, as reasonable as any other. The thing is to paint.