Since then, we haven't stopped running into each other, though not always visibly. Sometimes it was through a call. Other times, at ARCO, in Madrid, at a shared opening, in a shipment, in an image received at the exact moment. The relationship with Luisa has always had that strange and precious condition of some deep friendships: they don't need frequency to sustain intensity.
Her work has accompanied me at different moments in my life. Sometimes as inspiration, other times as refuge, other times as a form of consciousness. Many times, in front of her pieces, something difficult to explain in words has happened to me: a kind of inner stillness, a sudden clarity, a pure presence. Seeing one of her works, having it close, receiving a photograph of the process, or living with it at home has more than once led me to that state one only reaches when something true touches a very deep place.
That's why the visit to her studio in Palma was not just an anecdote. It was the materialization of something much older. We had collaborated many times. One of the most important was within Miradas, the project we developed at IMILOA with several women artists. The proposal was only seemingly simple: it was not about representing the brand from a commercial perspective, but about letting each artist interpret, from their own language, the deepest values that inhabited it. Luisa responded as true artists do: not with a solution, but with a universe.
I remember that series as a commotion. There were no impositions of format, quantity, or rigid aesthetic direction. Only freedom. And she returned that freedom transformed into an intense, generous, radically alive body of work. I think there were about twenty pieces, in different formats and techniques, also accompanied by documentation of the process that, for me, was almost as valuable as the final result. Because that's where the decisive moment usually occurs: in the way an intuition begins to take shape.
When Claudia and I traveled to Palma to see her, coinciding with a photographic production we had there, I understood something I might have already known but hadn't yet experienced in that way. Claudia was pregnant. There was emotion, tiredness, beauty, anticipation. And within that studio, everything seemed ordered by a different logic: that of the work, that of slow time, that of thought transformed into gesture. Luisa showed us the pieces, the tests, the decisions, the reason for each displacement. Everything was placed with an almost ritualistic clarity, but without rigidity. There was truth, and truth always orders without needing to impose itself.
Sometimes I talk, half-jokingly and half-seriously, about Stendhal syndrome. But what I felt there had something of that: an overload of beauty, yes, but also of meaning. Many of my visible passions converged in that space: art, image, material, process, aesthetic sensibility, and something more difficult to name, more internal, more silent. It wasn't just admiration. It was recognition.
