The Room
The gallery is a room in the historic center of Pontevedra. In the mornings, before I open the door, the space holds a particular stillness. A cart moves past my window. The exterior speakers greet the day with a song that’s become all too irritatingly familiar. The fresh cold air signals another opportunity granted. To start again.
The stillness of routine.
Most days, nobody comes.
I knew this was likely. Opening a gallery as a complete unknown in a country that isn't yours, in a city where your name means nothing, where the language you work in is not the one people think in — this is not a formula for immediate reception. I understood that before I signed the lease. What I didn't fully understand was what it would feel like to stand in a room I'd made and watch the door not open.
Pontevedra has its own cultural life. Its own artists, its own rhythms, its own ways of paying attention. I arrived from the outside with no context and no history here. Nobody owes this work any recognition. I know that. What I'm still learning is how to hold that fact clearly and keep creating anyway, without either collapsing into it or pretending it doesn't matter.
It matters. The silence matters. But it doesn't decide what happens in the room.
In the mornings, I'm here before the streets fill. The work is on the walls. I dust. Wipe the windows. Get coffee. Sometimes I paint. The light shifts as the hours move. Even inside this space, it falls differently across the works at different times of day. Each day moves through.
The gallery isn't waiting. It's where the practice has a physical address. Where the work exists in the world at a specific location, not only in files, not only in the interval between making and being seen. That matters to me even when no one comes to confirm it. The act of putting work on a wall, of maintaining a room for it, is its own kind of commitment to what the work is worth.
I made that commitment and I'm keeping it.
I'm not going to dress this up. The gallery is struggling. Being unknown in a foreign country isn't romantic. It's simply the current condition. Some days it sits heavier than others. There are weeks when the silence is just silence. No footsteps that slow down outside the window, no door opening, no one standing in front of a work trying to make sense of it.
But I’m still working. Still creating the kind of art that interests me rather than the kind that might find faster purchase.
Creating from the inside of something, from what it genuinely means rather than from what might find an audience, is the only approach I know how to sustain. When I've worked any other way, nothing stayed with me.
What stays is what I couldn't have made any other way. The image that came back different than what I thought I was making. A charcoal mark that dissolved the edge it was meant to fix. A frame that held something I only understood looking at it the following week.
That's what I'm making room for. Literally.
The door hasn't opened yet this morning. The light’s coming through, as it did yesterday.
And I'm still here.
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