The Mallorcan painter Joan Guerra, also known as Juan Guerra, passed away this Wednesday at the age of 87. Born in Sencelles, he was one of the most unique figures of Naïve art in Mallorca, with a body of work deeply linked to popular imagination, religious iconography, and the daily life of the island. A self-taught artist, Joan Guerra developed over decades a distinctive and easily recognizable style characterized by rounded forms, flat perspectives, a rich palette, and a naive yet symbolically charged gaze. His paintings and sculptures depict scenes of rural life, popular festivals, processions, churches, biblical figures, angels, and Mallorcan landscapes, always from a close, almost childlike perspective that eschews academic realism.

A facile joke, referring to that photograph by Isaac Buj, would suggest that there are people who, faced with the adversities of our time, climb walls. But the truth is that what has become known as "vertical work" brings back memories of earlier eras of capitalism that we had wanted to believe were behind us. The eras of the greatest lack of protection for workers, the eras of literally risking one's life for a wage. The images in movies, with workers cleaning skyscraper windows hanging from a harness, while the good guy in the film shoots himself with the gangs of the bad guys. The great millionaires from before the stock market crash of '29, owners and masters of the large production lines that were then recently invented.