She is not a woman: she is a house.

She is not a face: she is beams that hold up the world.

The lines do not destroy her; they hold her with the care of someone who knows that everything can crumble at the slightest carelessness.Painting, here, was an act of love that became structure.An attempt to leave the disease outside the body and inside the image.A ritual pause.A protection.

Portrait of My Mother (1999)**Eduardo Romaguera

There are works that are not painted: they happen.

They rush onto the canvas with the urgency of a soul seeking to sustain another. Portrait of My Mother belongs to that rare breed: a painting that does not describe, but contains, that keeps an intimate wound in suspension so that the world can read it without devastating it.

Created in 1999, during the long period of depression suffered by the artist's mother, the portrait becomes an emotional and philosophical cartography where form, body and space fold together to narrate the inner experience of pain. Romaguera does not portray a face: he portrays a state.

And he does so from an almost alchemical conviction: to stop the disease within the image, to fix it, to give it limits, to cut off its invisible expansion.

The figure appears fragmented into planes and chromatic beams that evoke expressionist cubism, but not as a formal game, rather as a diagnosis. The body is a tense architecture, a mechanism that functions out of obligation, an emotional machine on the verge of collapse. Its articulations are reminiscent of Russian constructivism, while the psychological rawness of the gesture refers to German New Objectivity.

Everything breathes a tension between the human and the structural: the body as a building that resists; the mind as a windowless room.The palette is a battlefield: reds, ochres and oranges burn like domestic burdens; the deep blues of the background sink into the depths of sadness.

A diagonal beam of light cuts through the composition with the precision of a scalpel—a ray that does not illuminate, but opens—resonating with futurist aesthetics but here turned into internal surgery.The artist's mother appears seated, but she is not resting. She is fixed in an intermediate state, suspended between being and collapsing.

She is a figure thrown into the world, in the Heideggerian sense, forced to sustain a home, four children and a fractured marriage. Her gaze does not seek out the viewer: it penetrates towards a point we cannot see, a territory where subjectivity struggles not to dissolve.The domestic space—the chair, the table, the deformed objects—becomes a metaphysical stage.

Here, the home is not a refuge: it is a heavy structure, a constricting geometry, a disciplinary landscape in the Foucauldian sense. Each rectangle is a burden; each line, a duty; each angle, a wound.And yet, there is tenderness.

The work does not humiliate or expose: it accompanies. Fragmentation does not destroy the figure; it sustains it. It is the artist-son's attempt to build a refuge within the painting, to offer his mother a place to rest without falling, a symbolic body where depression can be contemplated without consuming her.

Portrait of My Mother is, ultimately, an act of love turned into structure.

A gesture of protection that takes visual form. An image that freezes the storm so that it does not sweep away. Its essence rests in that paradox: a painting that not only represents, but also saves.

Today, the work stands as a testimony to a critical moment and, at the same time, as a fully contemporary piece, in dialogue with trauma, the phenomenology of the body and the poetics of fragility. It is a mirror of the human condition and an archive of care: the memory of a son who wanted, with paint and geometry, to stop the world from falling apart.

Those who take on the role of being a refuge and a home. It is a mirror of the human condition and an archive of care: the memory of a son who wanted, through painting and geometry, to stop the world from falling apart.

Those who take on the role of being a refuge and a home.

There are images that function as mirrors of a problem that cuts across an entire society. This portrait, born of intimate pain, has now become a collective symbol: the fracture of the contemporary home, the silent erosion of emotional refuge, the unequal weight that falls on mothers as the last support of family structures stretched to the limit.

The female figure that appears fragmented into planes, mechanical joints and angular tensions is not just a person: she is the metaphor of the home turned into a body. Her chest is beams, her back is a wall, her arm is a column. The domestic sphere, which should be a territory of protection, becomes a burden, an emotional architecture that cracks from within.

The work reveals something that few societies dare to look at:

the emotional collapse that lies behind the myth of the stable home.

For decades—perhaps centuries—the duty of sustaining the emotional, economic, and symbolic life of the family has been placed on the mother. She is the home. She is the refuge.

She is the wall. And when that wall breaks down, the system does not know what to do. Neither the laws provide complete protection, nor does the political will come close to intervening where pain becomes intangible and private.

The painting exhibits this crack without resorting to explicit drama: it does so through the geometry of the tear, through the form that attempts to sustain the unsustainable. Its angles speak of structural pressure. Its colours burn and cool like internal climates. The diagonal light that crosses the scene is a symbolic incision: a scalpel that opens up the emotional truth of the home.

Here the personal becomes universal.

A mother's suffering is not just an intimate event:

it is a social indicator, a structural alert, a symptom of the overflowing of roles that have not been redistributed or recognised.

Maternal depression — as common as it is silenced — is the tragic mask of a society that demands more than it cares for.

This work speaks, without discourse, of:

fragmented homes,

invisible burdens,

responsibilities that are not shared,

bonds that find no refuge,

policies that do not reach the emotional territory,

entire generations growing up in the echo of a creaking house.

Exposing this canvas is not about showing private pain.

It is about offering the public a mirror in which to see the fracture of the modern family model.

It is an act of symbolic reparation.

It is an invitation to rethink the invisible architecture that sustains our lives.

Home is the first territory of human beings.

When that territory is broken, everything else falters.

This portrait, rescued from intimacy and returned to the public space, is presented today as a call to collective consciousness, a reminder that no society can prosper if it neglects its most basic emotional structure: the home, understood not as a building, but as a bond.

"Retrato a mi madre", 1999, óleo sobre tela. Eduardo Romaguera.