Text by Óscar Manrique:

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It is not the first time that the art of flamenco, with all its strength and profound emotional charge, has found its reflection in the sensitive gaze of a painter. Throughout history, numerous artists have sought to immortalise the essence of flamenco through the brush, capturing in their works the forms, colours, expressions, and unmistakable feeling that define this movement. Yet there are experiences and intimacies that are more difficult—though not impossible—to contain within a static image: a gesture, a gaze, the force of a foot striking the floor, or the rhythm of clapping hands.

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Carlota Pérez de Castro’s work succeeds in capturing these energies, finding their tone and pigment, capturing their aura. In this way, attitudes become forms, gestures become matter, or vice versa, for the artist’s command of a broad range of disciplines allows her to interweave the grace, elegance, and expressiveness shared by both worlds—the performing and the visual. Flamenco tradition also speaks of a certain inner strength, of passion, and of a balanced connection with the emotional world. And if there is one thing abstract painting is concerned with, it is emotion: the intangible, the attempt to capture everything these dancers convey, which Carlota manages to distil like an alchemist in search of the elusive essence of the world; “imprinting” the enchantment, the precise sediment between soul and matter that invites the viewer to feel, to understand, and even to inhabit this performative event.

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Carlota Pérez de Castro’s so-called “experiential” painting becomes a vehicle through which to understand this elegant spectacle, integrating it into our own emotional narrative through what our eyes witness in the moment, while also allowing it to endure through traces that become paintings. It is not merely the instant perceived through the performance, but also the record of its presence. That presence endures as the tablao becomes the support, the floor becomes the horizon, and movement becomes something that no longer remains solely in our minds, but on the canvas itself—thus finding harmony between what we see and what we do not.

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Her “experiential painting,” with the artist’s subtle and graceful interventions upon the traces left behind, has a theatrical origin, rooted in the event’s scenography, as well as in the pure and direct dialogue established with whoever contemplates the final canvas. Even without having witnessed what took place beforehand, the viewer will understand, with very little, the magnitude of what has occurred.

In the end, the canvas becomes a map of calm waters: the traces of emotions released and left behind after the drama of the storm. An image that feels at once exotic and local, for it is precisely in this space between the two that flamenco has always existed.