Lola Lasurt’s exhibition Joc d'infants (Children’s Game) looks back more than fifty years to the first contemporary art event hosted in the same venue where it is now taking place—until 27 September. Now known as La Capella, the venue is the main exhibition space of Barcelona Producció, the grants initiative of the Barcelona Culture Institute, and a programme that Latitudes has been mentoring since 2016 (2017 and 2019–20 editions).

That first exhibition was staged between November 1968 and January 1969: a retrospective dedicated to the Catalan artist Joan Miró (1893-1983). Almost 400 works were exhibited throughout the former Hospital de la Santa Creu, with 15 recent pieces displayed in La Capella itself. The day after the Miró exhibition ended, the death in Madrid of antifascist law student Enrique Ruano sparked unrest, which served as an excuse for the Franco dictatorship to declare a state of emergency. During this two-month suspension of civic norms, the rule of law, and press freedoms, critical imagery and reporting was conspicuous by its absence.

Lola’s large paintings appropriate articles that appeared in national newspapers during this time of suppressed turmoil—faits divers, often related to infancy. The work seen in this month’s Cover Story is based on a clipping showing how to make a toy animal from felt and rafia. Each of the paintings borrow the format of one of Miró’s La Capella paintings, and together they participate in an experiment in colour which triggers visitors to sense ‘absent colours’—hues between the fluorescent green of the canvases and the magenta of the illumination.