When the Andalusian artist Carmen Laffón (Seville, 1954-Sanlúcar de Barrameda, 2021), who had produced paintings up to the 1990s, started to sculpt, she made many of her threedimensional pieces, like the one here, in bronze, a noble material common in other Spanish realist artists of her generation. Nevertheless, she also used poorer materials, such as the plaster of the vines she presented in her unforgettable exhibition at the Benedictine abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos (2006).

With a frontal presentation and strong pictorial references, Bronze Cupboard I (1995) portrays the same objects in this simple piece of furniture as can be found in her paintings. The cupboard is made to a popular design, with no ornamentation whatsoever to be observed as it is a functional object. It holds some modest pieces of crockery whose primal referent could be clay, the material in which the sculpture was in fact originally modelled. A bowl and jug on the top of the cupboard are accompanied by other objects kept inside, among which we see a large jar, as one of the doors of the cupboard is open. Humble though it is, the cupboard can be locked with a key, as things which are worthless to some are treasures to others. The simplicity presented in this still life runs parallel to her formula for painting landscapes. As she described it herself in her speech when inducted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in 2000, this is “a landscape without adornments. I think the quality that ennobles it is its simplicity, that apparent simplicity of infinite horizontals which divide the spaces of sea and sky and configure the strip of the Reserve. In my view, it is in the clarity and purity of the drawing of these lines that its harmony, vigour and force reside.”

Carmen Laffón presents a minimalised vision of the everyday crockery of a modest family. These simple objects for daily use are laid out in line, in this respect recalling the arrangements of the still lifes of Zurbarán. In this cupboard and its crockery, the passage of time is frozen in an instant, and the whole of a life experience is liable to be summed up in that second. These cupboards, like the suspended time of her paintings, can therefore be interpreted as an accumulation of instants, in this case of experiences in the home. The pieces transmit a sediment of life that eternalises the daily routine of the women of our recent past, for whom one day was similar to the next and the one before: days of oil soap cleaner, breadcrumbs with garlic, a brazier in winter and a fan held to the breast in the blazing Andalusian summer. From an early age, the artist in fact lived in La Jara, a district of the town of Sanlúcar de Barrameda near Cádiz, where she continued to reside in what was originally the family’s summer home near the estuary of the River Guadalquivir (described by Lorca as having “maroon whiskers”), and from which she serenely observed the living beauty of the Doñana Nature Reserve for eighty-seven years, from her childhood until her death last year.

This cupboard also has the appearance of a lararium. The lararium was a small Roman altar with elements that materialised the guardian spirits of the home and the memory of its forefathers. In a domus, it would be located in the atrium, at the entrance to the house, but in more modest dwellings it was kept in the kitchens, near the stoves. The protecting gods and energies would slip in among the pots and pans, into the ingredients of the food, and into the affectionate work of taking care of others, as the Spanish mystic Teresa of Ávila was to express centuries later with the phrase: “The Lord also walks among the stewpots” (Fundaciones, 5, 8).

The humble objects and shelves of Carmen Laffón, whose bronze epidermis holds unplumbable depths of times, evocations and memory, were felicitously retitled by the Spanish art historian and critic Francisco Calvo Serraller as “almarios”, or “cupboards of the soul”, because, as he wrote, “they are laden with invisible presences, with phantoms that escape through their half-open doors.”

Isabel Tejeda