Quim Monzó. Writer, Barcelona, 1952

I don’t know how things work on other planets, but on this one you sometimes get the feeling that if umbrellas were sold in boxes that had “Sweets” written on them, few people would realise that those boxes didn’t contain sweets, and fewer still would pipe out “hey, these are not sweets”. Because people usually look with borrowed eyes. / That’s why I love the way Oscar Tusquets looks at things. Because he looks with his own eyes at whatever he has in front of him, whether it is a book, a can of soft drink, a cathedral or a woman’s ankle. He sees what he sees, without looking through the distorting glasses of prejudice. and that is exceptional, because a lot of people, instead of seeing what they have in front of them, see only what they believe it is cool for them to see. That’s why clichés, conventions, stock phrases and hackneyed opinions are the order of the day. What almost everyone thinks about every single thing is what causes the least bother, what isn’t going to put them in an uncomfortable position, what they imagine they should think. It’s the same reason why year after year many students in drawing classes are incapable of drawing exactly as it is, from their own perspective, the vase they see in front of them. Instead, they draw a different vase, with different curves, from another perspective: the vase they carry engraved on their minds and which prevents them from seeing the real one. / There is a restless light in Oscar Tusquet’s gaze, a sparking of neurones bent on gauging why, for example, some guy should have turned up to the Drolma restaurant wearing sandals. He looks, computes, analyzes, ruminates, plans, dissects, connects cathodes to anodes and then hands us the rare flag of common sense.