Carmen Laffón: Small Things, Serious Paintings

🖼️🖼️🖼️ Worth a special trip

Ongoing until September 27

Carmen Laffón. Variaciones brings together 77 works, including oils, charcoal drawings, and sculptures of Sevillian painter and sculptor Carmen Laffón (1934-2021). It is the first major exhibition devoted to Laffón since her death. Rather than a show of tranquility and quietness, it demonstrates how small things can be made heavy. Behind the domestic objects and Andalusian landscapes, Laffón makes objects that could be easily seen as simple tests of attention.

Fig. 1. La cuna. 1995. Photo taken by the author.

The exhibition goes beyond the idea of Laffón as a painter of intimate things. This is not wrong, but it risks making her works seem too gentle. What's important here is what intimacy includes: memory, silence, waiting, and loss. Laffón’s artistic formation began early. As a child in La Jara, near Sanlúcar de Barrameda, she painted with Manuel González Santos, a family friend and neighbour. She completed her fine arts training at nineteen, then continued her studies in Paris and Rome. In Paris in 1954, she was drawn to Marc Chagall’s softened outlines and poetic atmosphere, and she also admired Mark Rothko’s use of emotion, light, and quiet contemplation.

This background matters because Laffón’s art is often called realist, but her realism is never merely descriptive in the sense of style. In La cuna (1995), the child lies inside a cradle before a large, glowing window. The cradle is dark and solid, while the curtains, bedding, wall, and body seem almost dissolved by light. The child is protected, but also exposed. The cradle becomes a place where dependence, tenderness, and disappearance meet.

Fig.2 Dark Still life. 1997-2000. Photo taken by the author.

The same seriousness appears in Dark Still life: fruit and a container placed on a red surface in front of a dark green background. But the red table is so dominant that the objects become small interruptions in a larger field of colour. Laffón is not showing abundance or possession. Instead, she is testing how little is needed for a painting to feel full. Nothing dramatic happens, but the painting holds your eye.

Fig. 3 While cupboard with two cups, 1995. Photo taken by the author.

The cupboard works make the exhibition’s argument even clearer. Armario blanco con dos tazas (1995) looks poor, used, and almost forgotten, while also seems carefully made and physically solid. The two cups on top indicate the memory of use. The whole object seems to hover between sculpture and relic. In the later Armario blanco (2017), the same subject becomes even more reduced. The limited colour and surface detail directs attention to the cupboard’s proportions and physical weight.

Fig. 4 White cupboard, 2017. Photo taken by the author.

Fig.5 Salt mound of Bonanza. 2020. Photo taken by the author.

The landscape paintings extend this logic outdoors.The family house at La Jara, facing the Coto de Doñana across the Guadalquivir estuary, was central to Laffón’s work. For decades she painted the same horizon from Sanlúcar, less interested in landscape as scenery than in changes of light and color. In her later work, she never fully abandoned recognisable forms, but pushed them until they came close to abstraction.

That movement reaches its form in the salt works. In her final years, Laffón developed a large body of work around the salt marshes of Bonanza in Sanlúcar. Salt mound of Bonanza (2020) shows a white salt mound across a wide horizontal format. It is landscape, but also object; mountain, ruin, body, and architecture at once. Laffón strips the world down until the simplest thing becomes monumental.

The question raised by Variaciones is not whether Carmen Laffón was recognised, but how she has been understood. She was already an established figure: she received the National Fine Arts Award in 1982, had a major exhibition at the Reina Sofía in 1992, and in 2000 became the second woman admitted as a full member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. Yet admiration has often narrowed her work through words such as delicate, silent, intimate, or poetic. The Thyssen exhibition shows why this is not enough. Laffón’s restraint is not softness, but control. Through repeated attention, she gives ordinary things a lasting force, proving that the smallest subjects can hold the full weight of memory, time, and experience.