Lorenzo Colomo Y Arquello (1950) - My Rabbit And Me

Oil on canvas. Original painting. Hand-signed.

This little girl in blue tulle, immortalized in oil with the pastel-like precision typical of families free from financial worries but lacking in imagination, wears the serious expression of one who already feels the weight of her legacy. In her small, silky hands, she clutches a pink stuffed rabbit the size of an elephant—a garish monster with which the bourgeoisie of the 1970s sought to sweeten their children’s childhoods to mask the smell of mothballs. It’s the era of the Seat 124 parked in front of the house and the crocheted curtain in the living room, but here there’s a pretense of lineage, an aristocratic image of a 300-square-meter apartment in the Salamanca neighborhood. The child poses solemnly, like a Velázquez infanta flattened by cotton candy, transformed into a trophy for parents who preferred to commission a painting from the artist of the moment rather than spend an afternoon at the park with her.

Poor little rich girl, shielded from the world by a fuchsia fur coat and a thick layer of oil paint that shields her from reality. No one had told her back then that this silly, smiling stuffed rabbit would be her only bulwark before she plunged into the abyss of adulthood: chic divorces, high-society neuroses, and sessions with a psychoanalyst to understand why happiness smelled like turpentine. An unintentional sarcasm is visible on the varnished surface of this canvas—the intimate tragedy of Spanish opulence, which believed that by giving the little girl a gigantic, disproportionate stuffed animal, it could immunize her against heartbreak. The little girl is still there, trapped in 1973, clutching her pink monster to her chest as one would cling to a lifebuoy in the middle of a wedding reception.

- Image dimensions without frame: 65 x 80 cm / 81 x 96 cm with exclusive custom frame.