A residency at espacio artkunstarte – a few steps from the Prado in one direction, from the Thyssen in another; the Museo Reina Sofía just a few paces further. Visceral still-life painting from across the centuries: fish, gloves, flowers. Black backgrounds. These imagined gloves are elongated beyond usefulness, estranged from any wearer. What if the flowers in Juan Fernando el Labrador’s painting had been carefully kept, pressed, for all these years? The exactitude of detail and yet the impenetrability of time past. One day I got locked in a dark museum after it had closed. I tried to take photographs, but as with those of ghosts, none were afterwards readable. Elsewhere, I saw a statue – one of many – like a computer-generated face. Almond blossom in the Retiro – beautiful and unsettling: papery blue-ish white; swollen pink-ish red.