female readers; “classical portrait project from a historical point of view”. The historical seen from the recreation of time, starting from the past as a model of inspiration, adapting it to the present, as a form of interpretation.

 

      _cc781905- 5cde-3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_     _cc781905-5cde- 3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_ Paula Anta (1977) takes the influence of seventeenth-century Dutch painting to make this series of photographs that rescues the woman reader as the protagonist. Formally it is based on the use of light as one of the main elements of the composition. As De la Tour, Godfried Schalcken, Rembrandt or Terborch have already done, he creates strong contrasts and chiaroscuro that draw the face of a woman who appears from the shadows concentrating on her reading. It presents us with a completely intimate moment in which its importance lies in the action of reading. The second element to take into account is color, if the 17th century portraiture relied on the range of browns, ochres, grays and yellows that would later be known as the "Spanish Palette", Paula offers a revision darkening the tones and creating a violent colder contrast, which gives the scene a more private character.

 

      _cc781905- 5cde-3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_     Con esta serie Paula Anta recupera no sólo los elementos formales of the pictorial language of the seventeenth century, but rescues a specific genre. The portraits of reading women arose from the 17th century and extended until the 19th century. They were simple paintings in which women appeared, generally bourgeois, engrossed in reading or studying. As we have said before, the important thing about these scenes was the action itself, so much so that even Madame de Pompadour (Marquise and lover of Louis XV) had herself portrayed in this way. They are paintings that also reflect the important content of the books in the expressions of their readers and in the emotion that their eyes reflect.

 

 In the Lectoras series we find a memory of this pictorial genre and also a contemporary vision of it. The eyes of the readers do not shine now by the light of a candle, but by the reflection of an electronic book or the screen of a laptop, formats that today are replacing paper at a dizzying speed. With this Paula Anta wants to reflect the present where we live illuminated by the technology of the ephemeral and persecuted by the reading of the immediate; therefore the moment has lost some warmth, because now we are dominated by colder lights. And we have also obtained the possibility of reading while we move thanks to mobile devices, thus losing that intimate moment of recollection.

 

Paula concludes that reading is now a path and asks us: Do we interpret our nature?