Paint dressmaker, silk painter, artisan, designer. Kima Guitart inhabits a vaporous world of vigorous fragility. Everything is delicate in her workshop in Barcelona. The light that enters through the study and the plants that dance in the garden on the ground floor are delicate.

Delicate remnants. Tinted but clean brushes. Delicate fabrics like low clouds above the tables. Like wisps of smoke that don’t rise. On the table CDs by Caetano Veloso waiting for that song that says “um amor assim delicate” to play.

Guitart likes dance, which guides her in her work for so many years, a career marked by daring and open to error or to paint soaking up more or less than necessary. The creator is in the news for her exhibition at the National Museum of Decorative Arts in Madrid (until September 3), where she recreates the world of the Greek myth of Cassandra in 2023 where violence against women follows the order of the day.

“I am very surprised at how the space affects the exhibition, first it was in the H2O gallery in Barcelona, ​​then in the Museu Tèxtil de Terrassa, now in Madrid the exhibition takes on a more sacred tone”, she comments to Magazine.

Guitart only works with silk. “There are many, so many, thousands, with different aspects, shiny, opaque, transparent, rigid, with a lot of fall. I haven’t had time to explore them all yet and I’ve been in the business for almost 50 years. In that sense I am teacher and apprentice at the same time. That’s the secret,” she reveals.

The artist-artisan-designer has always felt that she did not fit into any trade. “I don’t have the feeling of having fought a lot, I’ve been on the sidelines of everything. Artists wonder if I am an artist. The artisans that I am too much an artist. The designers, who have not just been…”.

“I move on the margins of these three fields,” he confesses. She has always seen me as an intruder”, says this curious woman, who has not looked much in the rear-view mirror and that everything has come to her through work and curiosity, experimenting.

“When I started, what worried me the most was technique and being able to express what I had in my head. When the technique stops being a problem, you have to find your own voice, try, make a lot of mistakes. I have an idea, but I’m open to what might happen. I have learned to work as if I were meditating in an active way ”, she points out.

How did the Cassandra exhibition come about? “Like so many other artistic projects, ignoring them, putting them in a corner. “In 2011 I painted some silks that measured three meters long by 75 cm wide and I painted it in various colors. I called them Veladures. Once they were done, I kept them, except for the one that was painted in red, which I hung on one of the walls”.

That canvas observed the artist and vice versa. Eight years later, she suddenly saw a world, “an umbilical cord, intestines, violence.” Guitart confesses that she went from intuition to clairvoyance and knowing how to channel history.

“I reread Christa Wolf’s Cassandra and the character questioned me and I decided to explain it with my tools. But the only piece that was worth was the red one. And in that, the pandemic arrived, so decisive for so many artists, to remain silent and think or to produce without brake.

“I was in my studio and the first thing I thought was to make a tunic, a tunic that dripped with blood. White as a symbol of truth, goodness, innocence and like a white Greek tunic and red as a symbol of blood and death. It’s like a path crucis, is a path, a threshold between life and death, between the visible and the invisible.Cassandra, in the work of Aeschylus, is clairvoyant, she knows that Clytemnestra will murder her.

For the creator, the protagonist of her work “is a current character, she talks about the war, about silenced women, declared crazy, she goes against revenge, violence. Women continue to be violated, murdered every day. She is a very powerful figure of feminism. Cassandra is current because myths – she concludes – are. She always “.