The day the roof gave way, Papartus’ studio was no longer the same. Beams collapsed, paintings shifted from their place, and light began entering through unfamiliar openings. For a time, everything remained suspended in that strange atmosphere left behind by an accident: dust hanging in the air, objects displaced, a space altered in a way that could not be ignored.

There are moments when life forces us to stop, whether we want to or not. Moments when something breaks: a rhythm, a routine, a way of inhabiting time. Suddenly, everything that once seemed to move forward naturally demands to be reconsidered. Not through drama, but through a quiet inner upheaval. As though certain fractures are necessary for something to breathe again.

What initially appeared to be nothing more than an accident also created a space for pause and reflection. In the midst of the chaos, works from previous years resurfaced, and returning to them revealed that they still held the same energy, the same impulse, the same way of sustaining the gesture. Yet now they spoke from a different place.

As in the interventions of Gordon Matta Clark, where cuts through architecture reveal hidden spaces, the rupture here also made visible something that had always been present, though perhaps it had never been seen in quite this way. It was not about returning to the past or revisiting it with nostalgia, but about understanding that one’s own body of work can also become a place of listening.

From that moment, a new dialogue began. Papartus approached his own work as someone returning to an interrupted conversation, only to discover that there was still something important left to hear. Rhythms, tensions, and gestures that had remained alive within his painting reappeared, not as memories, but as a force capable of activating something new in the present. This exhibition emerges from precisely that moment: from the renewed impulse that arises when one reconnects with everything built over time and realizes that painting still holds new ways of moving forward.

Papartus’ painting has always possessed something deeply physical, almost respiratory. One gesture leads to the next. One decision shifts the balance of another. Everything unfolds in the very act of happening. Perhaps that is why this project is less about reconstruction than it is about continuity: about the way painting, like life itself, must pass through moments of rupture in order to regain its movement.

Like vegetation emerging through the cracks of a ruined building, these works arise from a quiet transformation. Not from destruction, but from the possibility that something may grow again with more air, more space, and a different light.

Laura Darriba
Curator of the exhibition
Artistic Director of JUSTMAD and SUMMA Mallorca