The other ‘Guernica’ made of thread that adorns the Navalcarnero prison, an example of “taleguero art”

The Madrid IV penitentiary center, located in Navalcarnero, houses around 650 inmates and near them, specifically in the assembly hall, it also houses a replica of ‘Guernica’, made by the Argentine inmate Claudio ‘Goro’ Gorosito, who made the work by thread with the help of other companions.

This Wednesday, this penitentiary center presented, together with the Film Academy, the audiovisual intervention program in the same assembly hall where the replica is located. The workers of this prison have proudly shown the work with threads, which offers a new reading of the work and which has become one of the most prominent artistic elements of the Madrid prison.

“It is an example of talguero art,” the security personnel commented to the media, who have insisted on the technique of the work. “It is made with thread,” they have repeated.

Claudio ‘Goro’ Gorosito had the help of other prison colleagues to finish this replica in 2005, as he himself said in an interview in the Argentine newspaper ‘La Nación’. The work has a height of 3.49 meters by 7.77 meters long, 11 colors and 1.2 million hours of work. In this interview, he remembers that in 2003 an official brought a book published by the Prado Museum with a fragmented photograph of ‘Guernica’. Gorosito thought that, with threads, they had to replicate it.

“Picasso was my muse. ‘Guernica’ is my first child, that of sacrifice, that of pain. When I work I feel very nostalgic, because I learned in a place where one enters alone and leaves alone; the threads helped me mentally and gave me pride because there are few of us who do it. It was escape therapy in prison, work, cultural, artistic and development,” he commented.

The life of the artist and ex-convict inspired the feature film ‘Goro: the one who moves the threads’, an Argentine-Spanish co-production that won the Tenerife International Festival. “I am a plastic artist, until a while ago I was ashamed to define myself that way. But several people told me that I do with threads what others do with watercolors and oils,” he stated in the interview.

According to the synopsis of the film, Claudio ‘Goro’ Gorosito was a victim of his drug addiction, arrested with three kilos of cocaine in Spain, which would cost him an eight-year prison sentence. During his time in prison, the prisoner suffered from a degenerative disease and died in 2020, already released.