Taking his title from a collection of stories by Lewis Carroll, Pedro G. Romero produced this diptych that associates two images in relief with apparently contrasting contents. The left-hand panel is a portrait of Leopoldo María Panero, Spanish literature’s favourite poète maudit, who became an icon of the creative urges of madness and the scapegoat of a whole generation of poets and of a family dynasty. He also edited the Spanish edition of Carroll's A Tangled Tale in 1983. In the right-hand panel are a number of simple, concentric squares reminiscent of a well-known model repeated by the Bauhaus painter and teacher Josef Albers and associated with the utopian ideas of early 20th-century constructivism. Panero is shown at an age when his physical strength was waning and his mental condition was worsening. Indeed, he was to be admitted to numerous psychiatric institutions in his later years. His prematurely aged figure is mirrored with the immovable ideal of modernist perfection in the form of the square. Romero plays with the paradox of sanity and insanity, paranoia and logic (Panero & Albers) to redraw the limits between rational thinking and madness, which Panero equates in his comments on Carroll.

The work is designed so that spectators do not see what the reliefs actually depict until they are standing right in front of them. Thus, the appearance of the figures is an epiphany, like a double aura: a dystopia in life or a spleen (Panero's face) and a social utopia, an ideal (the geometry of Albers), shown respectively in sulphur and in yellow acrylic imitating sulphur. With this technical master-stroke, Romero ensures that the portrait will age over time and change more quickly due to the reaction of the sulphur, while the geometrical figures remain unchanged thanks to the greater durability of the acrylic paint used. Romero's interest in the paradox of lucidity and madness as different shoots growing from the same root led him to produce another version in which Albers' work is set alongside Antonin Artaud. Like A Tangled Tale, this marked the start of a career in which he would later show his interest in other marginalised and forgotten figures of literature such as José Bergamín and Juan Larrea.

Carlos Martín