The surprising real life of artist Emilia Gutiérrez, hidden in the novel 'La Flamenca'

After the death of her father, a woman locks herself in a house on the outskirts of Buenos Aires with a caged bird . She carries with her an oil painting by Emilia Gutiérrez and an obsessive fixation with the red of the pendant painted in it. This chromatic gesture is the trigger for La flamenca , Ana Montes 's novel published by Seix Barral, which transforms sensitivity into a driving force of life.

Emilia Gutiérrez, a singular artist, lived a life marked by isolation . In 1975, a psychiatrist forbade her from continuing to paint with colors because they caused hallucinations. From then on, for thirty years, she retreated to her apartment in Belgrano and produced hundreds of black and white drawings. However, on some of these papers, small red pencil lines crept in.

Ana Montes saw this gesture as a sign of rebellion : "I invented a theory I never wanted to test: that red was a curse, something I couldn't resist." From there, the emotional core of the novel was born: a protagonist who pursues that color as if it were a state of mind, a lost emotion she seeks to recover.

Montes gained access to Emilia's drawing archive through a collector who owned some of her work. He reviewed and cataloged these works, where he found traces of a subtle rebellion that would give rise to her fiction.

The flamenco artist is a down-and-out heiress who chooses seclusion as a form of resistance. In this isolation, she obsessively coexists with the painting she owns and with a mental image of the artist who painted it, as if that presence offered her a guide or an emotional mirror.

The figure of the doppelgänger , the double, structures the story : a woman whose life mirrors Emilia's. "I feel that writing things you might have done in a parallel life is a good way to channel an obsession," emphasizes the writer, who constructs a character who escapes into painting as an emotional refuge . Part of her poetic approach, as she herself has said, consists of taking everyday themes to their extremes.

The writing is fragmentary , composed of scenes that are interrupted, flow, and branch off . A mind gripped by obsession cannot narrate in a chronological or orderly fashion. Montes asserts that he conceived of the fragmentary novel as the only possible way to narrate from that state of mind: "I wanted them to be interrupted, like the holes in the mind."

This structure engages with a contemporary era marked by constant interruptions : short TikTok videos, multitasking, information overload. In that sense, the poetic and minimalist tone of La Flamenca presents itself as an alternative to linear and urgent narrative. In a way, it's a way to democratize reading and broaden its reach for all types of readers. "Let's be honest, how would we fit a 500-page book into our lives today?"

This isn't the first time Montes has worked with this type of format. Her first novel, Un poco frecuentes (2019), already had a fragmentary structure to address adolescence. This time, the formal break is more extreme. She quotes Chilean writer Gonzalo Maier to defend this choice: "I write briefly so as not to steal the reader's time." Brevity, then, as a form of precision and respect.

Emilia Gutiérrez's presence as an absent character runs throughout the novel. Although her work was little recognized during her lifetime, in 2023 she was featured in the Emilia retrospective curated by Rafael Cippolini at the Fortabat Foundation. That exhibition featured a large portion of the archive that Montes herself had consulted for her fiction. What is moving is that whenever a note about her appeared, Emilia would have it translated into English . A gesture that reveals her desire to be read beyond, to transcend.

The author reflects on female artists who were left out of the canon . Emilia painted in the 1960s, but her work didn't engage with the spirit of the times. While Marta Minujín presented "La Menesunda," León Ferrari produced conceptual works, and Pop Art was gaining ground, Gutiérrez displayed timeless landscapes, enclosed figures, and scenes out of step with their times . Her painting, without time or place, was left out of touch. And, at the same time, it is precisely this dissonance that makes it fascinating today.

The confinement of the protagonist of La Flamenca inevitably refers to the experience of the pandemic . The seed of the novel was a short story written in 2020, during isolation, included in Meditación madre (Mother Meditation ) (2022). In that context, the idea of ​​a woman who decides to get off the treadmill of productivity emerged. "It was something we all experienced and quickly forgot. I wondered what happens if you turn off all the stimuli in life and you stay still in one place, like an experiment."

The caged bird that accompanies the narrator functions as a metaphor, but also as a companion. It mirrors the narrator, Emilia, and art itself: "It reaffirms her existence. Let her continue chirping, keep eating, and answer it." The desire to remain alive is at stake in this connection.

The economic background is also present. The flamenco dancer is a declassed heiress, a recognizable figure in contemporary Argentina . Montes is interested in the sadness of those who once had a lot and no longer have one: "I'm very interested in the old money people who have fallen on hard times, who cling to something they have left. An ontological sadness of having had something and no longer having it." This condition permeates the protagonist: class, money, inheritance, loss, and precariousness.

Recognition for the novel came quickly. The flamenco writer was a finalist for the Todos los tiempos el tiempo award from the PROA Foundation (Argentina), the Las Yubartas Latin American First Novel Award (New York), and other relevant competitions that offered, in addition to visibility, a network of work and refinement.

Having been selected for PROA, Montes was able to attend a writing clinic with Ariana Harwicz and established a working relationship with Alan Pauls , who was part of the jury. "In the writing workshops, I encourage my students to enter competitions. It's a good way to meet deadlines and build a legitimate path."

Visual art remains a part of her life. Montes paints figurative scenes, many of them linked to the domestic world: women, cats, houses, interiors . In parallel with the completion of this novel, she is writing a short essay on the intersection of painting and writing, and is already slowly working on a new fiction in which she leaves the city for nature. Something of color, of confinement, of the extreme, and of the sensitive persists, as if continuing to create were her way of surviving the intensity of the world.

Flamenco , by Ana Montes (Seix Barral).