This artwork belong to BALGUI collection. Without a doubt, sex is an immensely powerful stimulus. My experience is one of succumbing to its effect over and over again. There are times when I am not even aware of how much its charm can affect me. My perception of the female has been transforming over time. The image I have formed of her in America is not the same as the one I have formed of her during my years in Spain. And this drawing expresses this second image.

The Spanish woman builds a completely different relationship with the male. Full of paradoxes. The gender relationship in Spain is one of love and hate. It has historical and complex cultural roots that I do not intend to develop here, since this is an anthropological study that goes far beyond this humble drawing. I will only keep the singular flavor that two experiences in 2004 left in my instincts.

The invitation was made by opening the doors, as when a pilgrim is given maternal hospitality, offered that conditional hospitality. The legs are open arms. Ape arms that are female legs, as human as they are animal.

In the center the most maddening sensitive temptation. A delicious dish for pleasure. Managed and served by a somewhat treacherous host, protective in appearance and yet piratical in nature. It suggests that there will be shelter in this deep cave, and at the same time, the shelter turns out to be a trap.

The opposition is in turning the soft, squishy or warm, protective envelope of vaginal flesh into just the opposite. A hard edge of metal, which wounds the flesh.

When the most loving and friendly point suddenly turns into the feast of menace. A bewildering flirtatious nest of playful little pigs, daggers, florets, catanas, guillotines, machetes and all kinds of swords. The sharp blade, in the woman is basically a metaphor for "the word" and its corrosive and bitter language.

The cloud that envelops everything is a geometric pattern of the Nasrid culture, reminiscent of the Iberian Muslim empire. From this model a femininity both protected and controlled is distinguished. And it is from this pattern that the collective conquers and makes itself present with its voice.

The scissors again allude to a duality of two functions. On the one hand, an emancipation that liberates as it divides. The umbilical cords link in the beginning what will be two individuals in the future. The scissors, on the other hand, are the tools used for amputation and castration.

The woman initiates an arms race, creates a belt of bullets. With them she empowers herself. She becomes even more influential, as well as hostile and aggressive. She assumes the role of a black widow.

The candles are a gesture of veneration. The creation of a shrine erected in the main nave of this cathedral of pleasures and pains.

Here the power relationship in the human race is made explicit. Every virile member who ventures into the vaginal paradise or has the courage to penetrate, runs the risk of castration, and even further, of having his personality severed, to nullify his masculinity at its root. A war that seeks to reach truces with a balance of forces.

A second reading for this approach is the metaphor of the deceitful promise. It can be extrapolated to the political level. It is the idea that some of the most successful mass ideologies are deceptive lies. Whose perfumed strategies of seductive proselytism, based on captivating naivety with a future of a fabulous social Eden, which far from being reached, disintegrates as it goes along, giving way to the same apocalyptic state.

That is when ideology takes over, when everything goes wrong, when the truth hidden behind the attractive lie appears, and when the illusions developed and embraced by the loyal followers, are also castrated without contemplation, ...., leaving them empty and at the mercy.