A Surrealist Vision of Madrid

Welcome, once again, to another of those arteries of cosmopolitan Madrid, where the classic and the modern coexist with a certain surprising decency, to the point of creating scenes that, depending on the perspective from which we view them, reveal a certain unprecedented surrealism: Columbus Square.

Dominating this labyrinth of urban crossroads, whose paths lead us into the heart of Madrid's most expensive district, is a small square, in the center of which a neo-Gothic obelisk serves as a perpetual lookout for a figure whose origins, centuries after his death, continue to be another of those unsolvable riddles with which History, sometimes a stepmother but perpetually a witch, punishes historians and curious people of all times: Christopher Columbus.

His outstretched arm, like the metaphorical extension of an imaginary meridian, points ahead, toward that continent, intuited but ignored for centuries, which ceased to be a legend in 1492, shortly after the Catholic Monarchs captured Granada and a new era of adventure and transoceanic travel began.

Facing the statue of the intrepid sailor are the Discovery Gardens, whose underground spaces house the former Villa Cultural Center, which was renamed Fernando Fernán Gómez, in homage to that irascible actor of Argentine origin, whose brilliant performances nevertheless captivated the applause of the Spanish public.

But perhaps the most surreal of the entire ensemble is the gigantic head, named Julia, created by the Catalan sculptor Jaume Plensa. It immediately captures the attention. Depending on the perspective from which you view it, it seems to rival in height, and even in monumentality, those iconic Columbus Towers, which, after half a century of captivity, have finally been freed from the burden of the cranes that crowned them.

Julia, the artist asserts, has her eyes closed, a clear invitation to introspection, to step out for a moment from the Matrix in which we live daily, and embark on that great adventure that is, of course, losing ourselves in the labyrinthine forks of the paths within our interior.

A circumstance that we may find most surreal, given that, by closing our eyes and peering into what truly lies hidden in the unknowable forest of our inner world, we then compare it with that falsified image, with that mask that the mirror returns to us when we look into it every morning.

NOTICE: Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property and are therefore subject to my copyright.