MADRID.- A quiet rooftop in Madrid, worn by time but softened by warm light, has been given renewed life through a careful restoration at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.

The museum’s Conservation and Restoration Department has completed conservation work on Carmen Laffón’s The Terrace, Madrid, painted between 1973 and 1975. The painting is among the works featured in the temporary exhibition Carmen Laffón. Variations.

The intervention addressed areas where the paint had begun to lift from the surface and where small portions had already been lost. Preventive conservation measures were also introduced to ensure that the work could be exhibited safely and remain stable in the years ahead.

The painting belongs to a series of urban views that Laffón produced during the 1960s and 1970s. During those years, she frequently turned her attention to terraces, rooftops and the landscapes visible from them in Seville and Madrid, the two major cities in which she lived.

These early urban scenes anticipated the views of Sanlúcar de Barrameda that would later become central to her work. From her studio on a street in the center of the Andalusian town, Laffón painted the surrounding landscape with the same restrained sensitivity that shaped her images of city rooftops.

In The Terrace, Madrid, the artist transforms an ordinary and somewhat neglected rooftop into a deeply atmospheric scene. There is no dramatic event and no obvious narrative. Instead, the viewer encounters a familiar space illuminated by a warm, enveloping light.

The result is both intimate and distant. The terrace feels lived-in and recognizable, yet it also carries the quiet melancholy of a remembered place.





That delicate balance made the painting’s conservation particularly important.

Museum specialists discovered a section where the painted surface had developed pronounced lifting. In some areas, fragments of paint had already fallen away. The problem was caused by weak adhesion between the paint layer and the ground beneath it.

The ground is the preparatory layer applied to the support before an artist begins painting. It provides the surface to which the paint must attach. When the connection between these layers weakens, the painted image can crack, lift or become detached.

To stabilize the work, conservators carefully reattached the paint layer to the ground using a natural animal-based adhesive. Controlled pressure and heat were then applied to secure the affected areas.

The porous nature of the ground, together with the use of a relatively dense adhesive, helped the treatment succeed.

Once the unstable paint had been consolidated, conservators were able to assess the full extent of the losses. The missing areas were filled and carefully levelled so they aligned with the surrounding original surface.

The final stage involved chromatic reintegration. Using watercolours and an illusionistic inpainting technique, specialists retouched the filled areas so that they would blend visually with the rest of the composition.

The purpose was not to repaint or alter Laffón’s work, but to restore the image’s continuity while respecting the original materials and appearance.

Following the intervention, the terrace can once again be experienced as a unified space, allowing Laffón’s subtle handling of light, color and atmosphere to come forward.

Born in Seville in 1934, Carmen Laffón developed a deeply personal approach to landscape, interiors, still lifes and portraits. Her works are often marked by muted tones, softened forms and an intense awareness of place.

Rather than presenting everyday surroundings as simple records of reality, she approached them as emotional spaces. Her paintings frequently hover between clarity and uncertainty, familiarity and distance.

Writer Jacobo Cortines once described the contemplative quality of her work as an effort to express a world that is simultaneously familiar and immersive, mysterious and ordinary, dark and luminous, tangible and elusive.

That description is especially fitting for The Terrace, Madrid. The rooftop remains humble and almost empty, but under Laffón’s gaze it becomes a place of memory, silence and suspended time.

Through the museum’s restoration, that fragile atmosphere has been preserved, ensuring that future visitors can continue to stand before the painting and enter its quiet, luminous world.