Pilgrim is a mythical figure that transcends space and time, a priestess who officiates and weaves a dialogue with the territory and the elements of the landscape, with the microcosm and the macrocosm. Pilgrim is the figure dressed in black that draws in his walk that border that occupied a physical space of 100,000 steps around the city of Segóbriga, described by Pliny the Elder in his book Natural History (77 A.D.), and which delimited the mining district of lapis specularis The Roman cities of Segóbriga, Valeria and Ercávica, located in the province of Cuenca, are the setting for Laura Torrado's new work: Specularia. The reflection of Venus (2023).

Since the 1990s, the artist has been using her body as a working tool in her performative work, which she records through photography. Torrado belongs to what Mariano Navarro, in the text The natural darkness of things (2013), claims as a sculptural lineage. Laura refers to her first performative work, Transhumance (1993), to describe a continuity in his trajectory, which shows itself to be more coherent and resounding at each step through pregnant images that he projects in the imagination of the spectator. At Transhumance, the artist embodies and symbolizes a cycle of life wrapped in a red cloth; now girded in black she represents herself being gestated (re-born) in the burial grounds of Ercávica. Since her formative years in NYC, there have been implicit calls in her work to artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Ana Mendieta or Rebecca Horn. In this new work she points to the actions of Valie Export in Body Configurations (1972-76), in which the body of the artist organized by urban space and is configured as a sidewalk, parapet or road. He cites some references to fiction and representation, such as Cindy Sherman, and states that it is not only a question of identity, "you resort to your physicality to recreate or fictionalize a scene, something that has to do with immediacy, with the first-person experience, the events end up building an identity story, although they were not born from that consciousness".

 Pilgrim has chosen the barren and lonely countryside of Castile as the setting in which it dialogues and officiates with the vestiges of lapis scattered in the landscape. There the author becomes a stone, a hermit, a furrow in the earth, she appears as a crack or as a step in the Roman theater of Segóbriga. She is the one who sleeps in the field of olive trees, and in the dream she draws a cartography with the body, the earth and time.

In this work there is a contradiction between presence and absence, between showing and hiding. The officiating figure is theatrical, affirmative, and yet appears veiled, without a face to be projected. This work connects with that previous series of drawings in black ink, Behind the veil (2020), which represents a female figure disappearing or moving away. The theatrical space is diluted in the pictorial space: a black box in which Laura intervenes and composes with representations of female deities, Astarte with crescent moon on her head (2nd century B.C. Babylon), The Annunciation of Fra Angelico (1437-1446), or La Dame à la Licorne (c.1500), they appear as veiled images through the specularia. With them, the artist tries to recover the figure of the goddess, to recall her and take her to another plane, to the mythical and transcendent plane to which she belongs, the return home.

As Baring and Cashford argue, we designate those sacred images of the life-giving, nourishing, and regenerating powers of the universe by the name of goddess. These female nomadic figures appear as images deactivated by patriarchy, stripped of their capacity for transcendence and transformation, of their value and meaning. They are narratives of and from exile. "If one goes beyond history and gets to art, reading the myth symbolically, beyond gender theologies, this story of exile becomes a story about the birth of human consciousness."

In this theatrical and pictorial space there is communication between the human and the transcendent, between above and below. The artist resorts to baroque painting: Christ crucified (c.1632), Venus in the Mirror (1647), by Velázquez, the affected gesture of Caravaggio in the double image The reflection of Venus (2022), in which the narcissus reflections do not correspond and adopt an ambiguous gesture, as in the work Boy bitten by lizard (c.1593-95), a scene between drama and eroticism. A reflection on the pictorial representation, the folded and scenographic space. In the image Venus (2022) the game of the hierarchy of the gaze is altered, as we are looked at by it the act of voyeurism cannot happen without a certain discomfort. "The figure does not show the mirror either, perhaps because that mirror in which she looks is the one who looks."

In the photographic series Suspended life (2010-2023), the artist uses debris, ash, dead flowers, hair, butterfly wings... It is a work that makes reference to the fading of beauty in the face of a devouring chronos, present in the vanitas of the Baroque: the Eros-Thanatos duality, eroticism, is presented as a source of life and death. An artistic period that appears renewed from its practice and its idea of beauty understood as provocation, at the limit. "A disturbing beauty that entails a revolution, that of everything that exists on the border of its immediate destruction".

Another image that precedes this project is Duel (2022), a female figure that appears on a bunker. With her begins the tracing of a cartography of pain: she points it out and signifies it in order to transform it. Compassion understood as companionship in pain, in passion.

Specularia. The reflection of Venus responds to the nomadism inherent to the condition of being an artist, to the awareness of the non-acceptance of limits in the desire to experience the body as a political territory. She recovers the symbols of the telluric and the cosmic, she is the mediating figure that officiates. Art is the lighthouse.