Power, be it private, state, or religious, has always sought to use art for its own ends. From the imperial mosaics of Byzantium to the frescoes of the Vatican, from the portraits of monarchs to corporate branding today, art has long been conscripted to extend the brand of dominance. A scepter in one hand, a paintbrush in the other. What we are shown is never neutral. A cathedral ceiling whispers divinity sanctioned by men. A war monument teaches obedience dressed as memory. A television ad turns desire into doctrine.
Under such pressures, artists must choose: to amplify power, or to quietly slip away from its gaze. Isabel Quintanilla chose the latter.
Her Glass on Top of the Fridge (1972) refuses grandeur. It refuses narrative. It offers nothing but presence—a single, humble object resting in light. In Francoist Spain, where visual culture was saturated with Catholic piety, nationalistic imagery, and heroic realism, this painting says: there is another world, right here, in the kitchen. This world is not scripted by generals or bishops. It belongs to the anonymous—the grandmother who dries dishes in silence, the daughter who fills a glass and thinks about her future, the son who stands barefoot on a cold tile floor. These lives, unstoried and unendorsed, were not on the billboards or stamps. But Quintanilla painted them anyway.
The composition is sparse: a cheap glass, filled with water, sits on a white refrigerator. Its shadow stretches across the top, and the light, diffused and gray, seems to come from an unseen window. There is a quiet geometry at play—the vertical lines of the glass, the horizontal edge of the fridge, the angular intrusion of light. The viewer is held in this austerity, asked to slow down, to look again. Nothing here is rushed. Nothing is made to sell or to glorify. Instead, it dignifies.
This act—of simply seeing—was subversive. It still is.
To paint the ordinary with reverence is to wrest meaning away from those who monopolize it. If the state says greatness looks like a general on horseback, then a glass of water becomes resistance. If the church says holiness wears robes and performs miracles, then a fridge lit by morning sun becomes a reliquary of another kind. Even private power—wealth, media, systems of taste—tells us what is worthy of our attention. Quintanilla ignores them all.
She does not shout. She does not accuse. She does something harder. She stays.
There is a long tradition of this kind of defiance. Vermeer did it when he painted a woman pouring milk. Chardin did it with a peach and a copper pot. In the 20th century, artists like Giorgio Morandi and later Antonio López García followed suit—showing us that the politics of attention is itself a battleground. In a world of spectacle, attention is currency. When we give it to the overlooked, we change the economy of value.
I think often about what kind of art we make under pressure. When institutions expect utility or alignment, when even social media subtly demands performance—who dares to paint a fridge? Who dares to take up space not with declarations, but with silence?
Quintanilla’s painting is not trying to persuade. It’s trying to endure. It tells us: the world does not belong to those who speak the loudest. It belongs to those who keep living, quietly, beneath the noise. Those who take a glass, fill it, and place it down. And those who, like her, notice.