BASEL.- Holidays must be our desires and fantasies come true, something extraordinary that on principle contradicts the daily routine and suddenly transforms us into happier beings.

Longing for the holidays is what Pilar knew how to do best; it was her true profession – a professional vacation dreamer. And it was that deep desire to be happy that filled her childhood with monumental joy and that years later would become an infection and true delight. Being next to Pilar was something like furrowing a river with the spirit conga or like ten in the morning in July when we enter the sea for the first time.

In 1961 when Pilar turned 27 she decided to plan a different kind of vacation. Many things had happened in Havana the previous year and almost all of them were extraordinary. Like a miracle, or better yet, like a spell, from one day to the next revolutionary law punished the mere fact of saying the word vacation. Let it be clear that I am not exaggerating. According to the revolutionaries, what was actually happening in those years throughout the island was the fulfillment of the authentic vacations that the people had longed for during the last 100 years and that in the following years would become the longest “vacations" in history. For the revolutionaries there was an inherent logic to call the revolution “vacations” but for Pilar this was just nonsense. Nevertheless these "revolutionary vacations" forced Pilar to vacation in a different way and perhaps an even better way.

Thus in June of 1961 at 27 years of age Pilar Peláez of Saragossa began to paint outdoors, with oil paints and an easel. From that summer on painting would become her only kind of vacation and year after year Pilar would do the unspeakable to prolong them, until one day the ordinary daily routine disappeared completely from her life.

"Her Holidays" as I have titled this personal exhibition at the Nicolas Krupp Gallery in Basel, is an approximation to the life and work of the holiday painter Pilar Peláez of Zaragoza. This series of paintings, sculptures and drawings sum up my most determined notes on the relationship between painting and happiness. It deals with that extraordinary “something” that Pilar sought to speak about and her joyful solitude.

When we paint and all of that "lost time" becomes a mirror that reflects only what is good, that is the moment when a painting emerges and everything disappears around it. Its frame confirms that beyond it’s format - in that abyss - everything else is imperfect and unfinished.