Guernica, in Passing

I kept returning to the Reina Sofía that week…

Once in the morning, once after lunch, once again in that liminal hour between tapas and wandering through El Retiro with no real destination. Madrid has a way of making time feel porous. You can slip in and out of museums the way you slip in and out of light.

Each visit ended the same way.
Standing in front of Guernica.

It occupies its own room, a long and hushed expanse that gives the painting enough air to breathe and enough distance to overwhelm you. No clutter, no competition. Just the vast black and white shock of it. Scribbles and scratches and shapes assaulting one another. Lines that feel less drawn than carved. Picasso attacking the canvas with an urgency you can still feel decades later. The whole surface is restless, vibrating, almost hostile. It hits the retina before you’re ready. It leaves the heart in pieces.

Above it all, the unblinking eye.
A light that is not illumination so much as surveillance.
Cold. Aware.
Offering nothing.
Intervening in nothing.
Just watching the ruin, the way history watches everything with perfect recall and perfect indifference.

On our final visit, we drifted close enough to overhear a private tour.
English speaking, earnest, standing politely behind the group without joining them enough to owe anyone money. Their explanations slipped into our orbit. Notes about composition, political context, the speed of Picasso’s work, and the way his lines move like fractures. We nodded without nodding. Learned without admitting we were interested.

I’m never prepared for the quiet violence of the room.
The stillness you feel when art refuses to comfort you.

It’s a painting born from the sky torn open. The bombing was swift and indiscriminate, and Picasso worked with a kind of urgency that matched the devastation.

There’s something monumental in work that doesn’t soften its edges.
Something necessary.
Guernica is a reminder that form alone, the stark palette, the asymmetry, the frantic geometry, can hold enough emotional voltage to last a lifetime if you return to it, feed it, let it haunt you a little.

I think that’s why I kept going back.
Not to understand it, but to stay near the fire.

I carry the eye with me.
It lives on the inside of my left arm, a reminder of how the world can watch without intervening.

Art like this doesn’t ask for interpretation.
It asks for presence.
For repeated encounters.
For the willingness to stand there again and again until the shape of your attention shifts.
Between meals and long walks, that’s what the painting became.
An anchor point, a place to recalibrate.
A reminder that style isn’t decoration, but force.
That black and white can speak louder than any color.
It says, “What looks like chaos can become coherence if you stay with it.”

Some works become part of you because you decide not to look away.

Guernica is one of mine.