Two of the three Roser Bru catalogs are broken. And that Paula Bonet – Bru was his teacher and an essential figure – bought the second hardback. The dedication of the third, sent by some friends from Chile, advises her not to take him to La madriguera so he doesn't end up like the others. But it is here, with the essential art books, by Hilma af Klint, Gerhard Richter or Alice Neel.
Three years ago, Bonet moved the workshop to this quiet passage in the Eixample. A maximum of nine artists work there, women of all ages. Between the press room and an inner courtyard, there is the library. The shelves fit perfectly into the walls, as if they had found their place. He has a special love for the one in the corner; his father and grandfather made it there in 2002 with pallets, based on a drawing he made for them. For her it was important to have a beautiful bookshop, which would last over time and where the books were protected. So, a few years later, with his first salary, he bought a four-piece display case that has conditioned all the flats he's lived in. There are a few more, one dedicated to literature related to the Nomadic Workshops he organizes: groups of painters travel to Jerusalem, Egypt, Florence, and soon India.
At a huge table, in the center, there is always someone sketching, or writing, or reading. It is also the work of Bonet's father, from a time when she decided to live alone, and that her house was a meeting point between friends, with a table on which to have lunches and dinners. Circumstances have made that place La madriguera; he has his studio there and will soon open a gallery there. Next to the blackboard, a serigraph by the Chilean photographer José Luis Rissetti (a cap collected during the Social Outburst) and the green handkerchief claiming the legal abortion that an Argentine artist left there when she came to do a one-week residency and one month left.
Bonet has always linked painting and literature. As a child, she was shunned by an annoyance that she didn't quite understand: "I come from a supposedly very big town that is actually very small". If you weren't interested in religion or football in Vila-real, you were isolated, he says. When I opened Fnac in Valencia, I didn't even know where to start. He pulled Anagrama, became obsessed with Paul Auster. Maybe then he didn't find the books that later shook him so much; he lacked the tools. "You are formed through the readings you do, this is how you shape the world that moves you". I discovered Rafael Chirbes while he was writing L’anguila; he must have reread El año que névó en Valencia about twenty times. He can't wait for the Spanish versions that the publishing house Chai publishes of Celia Paul and, like Anne Sexton, he reads it in English.
He always carries a book on him. Read every day with the first coffee. But the best time is at night, in bed. He likes to share it as a couple: "He's with the myths, I'm with the novels, and it's nice, because we read fragments aloud to each other." Their libraries are quite extensive, but they do not match on almost any title, “and they fit together very well; Ramon has a lot of poetry written by women, and if it wasn't for him I wouldn't have read Umbral".
The last time he remembers doing a reading ritual was during the pandemic, during confinement, when he was preparing to empty old boxes that had been closed for years. Then he found a yellow book, it had been his bible while studying Fine Arts, Materials, Procedures and Pictorial Techniques. He told himself that he would read it in the evening, with a glass of wine, to perhaps be reunited with nostalgia. And so he did. The first sentence was: “The man-painter dio su... ‘The man-painter’! With hyphen! I did so, and I said, fuck you!”. He had devoted his career to worshiping the man-painter. "And above it is underlined". He checked the entire library and made mountains of men-painters and men-writers that he knew because he had to know them, but they did not bring him anything. He threw them into a paper bin.
As a reader, she says she has been well fed. And as a painter, literature allows her to build from another place. Buy many books at Windows; some for her, others for everyone. They are in the heart of La madriguera.
