🔊🔊 l o n g r e a d 🔊🔊 Yesterday I spent the whole day in a hospital for the elderly and retirees—helping, assisting, accompanying an older adult close to me… I came back in the early morning and had the whole day to reflect on many things… Hospitals, if you connect with more than just your own navel, really make you reflect… I was thinking about lived life, contained life, broken life, decay, the system, the elderly, abandonment, indifference, mistreatment, neglect, sensitivity, empathy, love… and a memory from 2020 came to mind… Back then I was still working at a wholesale supermarket, and I had a coworker with very limited means (just like me) a friend… He always insisted on buying one of my pieces… I had never sold my art and felt a certain cringe about it, which pushed me away from anyone who wanted my work… We always joked about it—“you don’t earn enough to own one of my physical works, Roque” one day he left to follow his path as a carpenter, and I felt proud of him. He was a loving guy… simple, straightforward, I cared (and still care) for him deeply… Later, during the pandemic, one day he came to visit me at work, and I closed up my workstation to attend to him—you know, priorities, affection, real life… friends… He looked worn down, with dark circles under his eyes, and just said he was tired of work (he didn’t want to, or didn’t dare, tell me in person, maybe so he wouldn’t break down). A couple of hours later he messaged me on WhatsApp saying that his 3-year-old daughter ‘AGUSTINA’ had been diagnosed with leukemia… he was devastated, and so was I… we spoke almost daily back then… I used to tried to make him laugh, to keep his spirit balanced between grief and everything else… he kept saying, “you have to sell me a piece,” and I still wasn’t selling… That Christmas (or New Year’s), he said he was coming to visit, so I got ahead of it and framed one of my works—my first piece approached from a different angle, from the abstraction of a specific, developed theme… the abstraction of strength. I had created it in 2014… a unique piece because of its process… one of the first (or maybe the first) using watercolor… I’d had it stored away for a long time and thought of using that one… I surprised him and gave it to him as a gift. I hid behind our football club rivalry, telling him that as a San Lorenzo fan I could never sell my art to a Boca Juniors supporter… so it had to be a gift. He laughed and pulled a bottle of red wine from his bag and said that as a Boca Juniors supporter, he could never share a beer with a San Lorenzo fan, so… Then he asked what the piece was about, because he didn’t understand anything about art, but he always wanted to buy my work to support me and because he liked it… so I told him about the abstraction of strength, the symbolism, about them, about family, about friendship, about illness… He cried and hugged me… then we kept joking about silly stuff, about life in this country, about prices and blah blah blah… we laughed, shared a cigarette, and left… Some time later I saw him again, and he had a new tattoo: the image of his now 5-year-old child with two dates. I didn’t ask. We hugged and joked a bit with tears in our eyes, sad laughter, contradictions of life if there ever were… Even though we still talk from time to time, we never saw each other again… I started selling my art as NFTs and left that job… Last night I thought of them, of the elderly, of children, of those most vulnerable to life’s injustices—the real life ones, not the ones in here… I thought about my art hanging on that still unfinished wall, which isn’t the wall of the MoMA or any exclusive museum or gallery, but a part of a life barely lived… I don't know, maybe because of the antonym, it came to mind... I owe you the reflection… the final gaze is yours to place…