Two of the three Roser Bru catalogs are bursting. And Paula Bonet – Bru was her teacher and an essential figure for her – bought the second hardcover. In the dedication of the third one, sent by some friends from Chile, she says not to take him to La Madriguera so that he doesn't end up like the others. But here she is, with the art books, along with other essentials, such as Hilma af Klint, Gerhard Richter or Alice Neel.
Three years ago, Bonet moved the workshop to this quiet passage in Eixample. A maximum of nine artists work, women of all ages. Between the press room and an interior patio, is the library. The shelves fit perfectly on the walls, as if they had found their place. He feels a special love for the one in the corner; Her father and her grandfather made it for her in 2002 with some pallets, based on a drawing she made for them. For her it was important to have a beautiful bookstore that would last over time and where the books were protected. So, a few years later, with her first salary, she bought a huge four-piece display case that has shaped the apartments in which she has lived. There are some more, one dedicated to literature for the nomadic workshops that she organizes: groups of painters travel to Jerusalem, Egypt, Florence, soon to India.
At a big table, there is always someone drawing sketches, writing, reading. It is also the work of Bonet's father, from a time when she decided to live alone, and for her house to be a meeting point for friends, with a table where they could extend lunches and dinners. That place has turned out to be The Burrow; Here is her studio and soon she will open a gallery. Next to the board, a serigraph by the Chilean photographer José Luis Rissetti (a cartridge collected during the social outbreak) and the green scarf demanding legal abortion, from an Argentine artist who came to do a one-week residency and stayed for a month.
Bonet has always linked painting and literature. As a child, they avoided her from an anguish that she did not fully understand: “I come from a supposedly very big town that is actually very small.” If in Vila-real you were not interested in religion or football, you would remain isolated, she says. When they opened Fnac in Valencia, she didn't even know where to start. She pulled Anagrama, she became obsessed with Paul Auster. Perhaps she would not find then the books that later shook her so much, she lacked her tools. “Then you form yourself through reading, you configure the world that concerns you.” She discovered Chirbes while she was writing The Eel; She will have reread The Year It Snowed in Valencia about twenty times. She can't wait for the Spanish versions that the Chai publishing house publishes by Celia Paul and, like Anne Sexton, she reads it in English.
He always carries a book with him. Read every day with your first coffee. But the best time is at night, in bed. He likes to share it as a couple: “He is with the myths, I am with the novels, and he is nice, because we read fragments aloud to each other.” Their respective libraries are quite extensive, but they do not coincide in almost any title, “they fit together very well; Ramon has a lot of poetry written by women, and if it weren't for him, I wouldn't have read Umbral.”
The last time he remembers doing a reading ritual was during a pandemic, during confinement, when he was preparing to empty old boxes that had been closed for years. He found a yellow book that had been his bible while he studied Fine Arts, Materials, procedures and painting techniques. He told himself that he would read it at night, with a glass of wine, to perhaps reconnect with nostalgia. And so he did it. The first sentence was: “The painter-man gave his... The painter-man! Hyphenated! I did like that, and I said, fuck it, man! He had dedicated his career to worshiping the man-painter. “And on top of that it is underlined.” He reviewed his entire library and made mountains of painter-men and writer-men that he knew because he had to know them, but they didn't contribute anything. He threw them into a paper bin.
She says that, as a reader, she has taken great care of herself, she has fed well. As a painter, literature allows her to build from another place. She buys many books at Finestres; some for her, others for all. They are all at the heart of The Burrow.
