Some years ago, I met the work of a French artist. Among her works, there was a small figure, somewhat grotesque, yet imposing. «It’s a vigil!» she said in her broken tongue. «He watches over me.» Now, as I prepared to write these lines, the anecdote comes to mind, and this simple word game. María del Pilar Josefina Vigil Cartagena, Peruvian by birth, spent more than half her life in Barcelona, settling in Buenos Aires eleven years ago. Here, for the first time, this «vigil» (guardian, sentinel) emerges. If we think of the sentinel as someone who guards a place or a thing, staying for long periods waiting for signals and often keeping a discreet position, then we have this «vigil» to our measure.

In the midst of her childhood, Pilar, daughter of an adventurous man from La Mancha and a very tender and strong-willed young woman from Lima, is transplanted along with her younger siblings to the Barcelona of the final days of the Franco regime. And although the family is progressive and has a clear desire to integrate into the new environment, something of the softness, the perfume, a certain authentic and tropical flair of Peru always remains latent in them. Faced with the often-put-on rudeness of the Spaniards, a rudeness that Pilar also learns, her condition as an «overseas woman» remains in custody, almost in secret. The university years arrive. Common sense dictates that she should pursue a career with guarantees. Pilar graduates in History from the University of Bellaterra. A year later, she gets a position as a professor. In all of this, she performs with firmness and security. Without stumbles… only that sometimes, out of the corner of her eye, she has seen Neruda, Tàpies, Vallejo, Miró… parade by.

Perhaps being an artist was not a serious and structured profession. Many times, she has been on the verge of letting this nascent poetic vocation drown, but there is always a small blue flame alight, the pilot light, the sentinel. Timidly, she collaborates with her poems in university magazines, while she begins to save her telephone doodles. Along a facade of the Barcelona Cathedral, several floral scrolls and some grotesque black faces appear. Suddenly, Pilar the Watchwoman notices the ink wires, rescues them from the basket, stretches them, tries to color them, to make them intentional. Since then, about fifteen years ago, she hasn’t stopped. She paints, writes, and organizes.

Circumstances bring her to Buenos Aires. Over time, this ordeal is transformed into a new engine. She takes up writing again. In several compositions, poems, portraits, and versions of a novel, still unpublished, she allows much more than idiomatic turns or reminiscences to flourish and bear fruit. A world of evocations from the intimate, everyday redoubt transits through her prose. With this intimate familiarity, she recreates and poetizes her experiential universe. Her artistic work, for its part, fights to conquer Pilar’s attention, who for a long time sharply alternates literary and plastic periods. Both intuitions, itineraries, and battles fight for a time in the artist’s mind, like tenacious contenders. When one predominates, the other enters a light, watchful sleep.

For a few years now, the plastic arts have governed, although perhaps they do not watch sufficiently. It is not an authoritarian, absolute government. Among the ranks of the pure plastic arts, seditious cells sneak in, trying to keep other languages and bygone interests alive. Pilar selects a special angle to capture or re-design reality. Her images, her characters, are presented with a figurative simplicity that is sometimes assimilated as a vigorous and humorous synthesis, but other times seems to border on the painful and threatening flatness of non-art. It always festoons her: it seems to challenge itself by challenging us. In any case, she watches, smiling. By casting her gaze and choosing her materials from among the humblest and most domestic, her restless spirit travels through those towns of stone, sheet metal, cardboard, and rush. Her retina is impregnated, her sense of smell seeks the resinous smoke of the hearths, village sunsets, a universe of cowbells, spoons, threshing sleds, and pitchers. The native land of all of us. Perhaps through this vigil, we all pass, a vigil of a greater Dream.