Night falls. A very fine rain begins to penetrate the walls of the cloister while a conversation breaks the monotony with which the drops hit the stones. The voices of some artists echo behind a door. They are in the refectory and talk about love. They discuss painters. One of them radiates experience. "We painters," he says, "dream wider, even if we know we won't have time to realize our dreams...". Another interrupts him. He says it's the same with love: "We know little, it would take much more time to understand it better. But we know what its foundations are: love is life lived. When we love, we live.

On the occasion of Architecture Week, and with the "Masters of Figuration" Painting Workshop as a backdrop, the University has organized a meeting in the Cathedral with Antonio López, Pedro Juan Viladrich and Juan José Aquerreta.

Suddenly, a question arises: where is the line between truth and lies, between art and farce? From the experience of his paintbrushes, Antonio Lopez throws himself into answering this question. The split between truth and low human passions such as vanity or pride, he says, began in the Renaissance. The lie, he continues, arises when the artist is obedient to society, when society seeks spurious, false reasons for its own pleasure and enjoyment, and the artist fabricates them. In that sense, he concludes that the modest works of the twentieth century are truer than many of the great works in the great museums.

Outside it has stopped raining. In the darkness of the afternoon, the conversation takes temperature as it descends from the world of ideas to the sensible world, the world of every day and of every exhibition. Hundreds of eyes listen attentively.

"Is money a way to detect that the artist's intention is not true but that he is looking for a profit?" Pedro Juan Viladrich is vice-president of Intereconomia and the second voice of this choir. He receives a unanimous answer: the artist has always needed to survive.

A third actor enters the scene. It is Juan José Aquerreta. For him, art has degenerated to the extent that man contemplates himself: "Just as a society that does not serve its citizens is a sick society, the same is true of art". Until the 13th or 14th century, he recalls, there was a communitarian phenomenon in the works. But from the Renaissance to the -isms of the 20th century, art has suffered the consequences of man's centrism.

I would love to work from a dictate superior to me," Antonio Lopez reproaches him, "but to investigate oneself is the only way out. Because collective visions like Nazism or communism, at least for art, are the worst there is".

Since he, Antonio López, was born (six months before the Civil War broke out), the world has not stopped stumbling. "Will there be something to pull us out of this darkness?" he wonders. He recalls how man appeared in the world long after larger species perished. "Maybe the darkness will also take possession of man and eventually destroy him," he says. Or maybe not.

Little by little the refectory of the Cathedral is fading. The last onlookers enter a night that closes for minutes. The lights go out and the silence is made, only interrupted by the wind that blows against the treetops. Thus ends an evening of Philosophy, typical of the Age average and framed in the XXI century. Things of art... or of artists.