"Imagine you have 4,000 puzzles of 1,000 pieces, you mix them all, you burn 90%, and then you try to reassemble them with the ones you have left." Santiago Alcolea, a Catalan art historian, describes with this image the work of medieval art historians. Knowing the author, the place of origin, or reconstructing an altarpiece from the surviving compartments can be a race full of obstacles.

The tramontana wind, bitterly cold this mid-November Monday, howls furiously through the narrow, steep streets of Cadaqués, deserted today, with closed doors and windows and drawn shutters on bars and restaurants, all displaying signs announcing extended holidays. Quietude, tranquility, and the only sound, the onslaught of the tramontana. This is the Cadaqués that the Japanese painter Shigeyoshi Koyama loves, the Cadaqués he so desperately misses during the summer, when the revelry and noise take over the town day and night, forcing him into exile in the quiet village of Vilanova de la Muga until September, when the summer visitors leave and Cadaqués returns.

A painting by Gustav Klimt (Vienna, 1862-1918) has broken all records and become the most expensive work of modern art and the second most expensive in the history of art. It is the painting Portrait of Elisabeth LedererThe painting, which the Austrian artist created between 1914 and 1916, depicts the young heiress and daughter of Klimt's employers dressed in a Chinese kimono. The work sold for €203.56 million at an auction held at Sotheby's in New York.

The multidisciplinary artist Ivan Forcadell (Alcanar, 1993) champions the persistence and discipline of the countryside as a creative driving force. Between tradition and irony, Forcadell rescues objects and memories from the rural world to give them a new aesthetic life and reveal a universe of their own. His latest exhibition, No title, can be visited from September 18 at the SELTZ gallery in Barcelona.

Summer is here, and with it, days of intense heat and intense sunlight. Parking your car in the sun while at the beach, the pool, or doing any other activity means having to endure hellish temperatures if you have to use the car, and driving becomes an unpleasant experience. But Nissan is working on a special paint prototype that can reduce the vehicle's ambient temperature, ensuring occupant comfort on the hottest days, reducing air conditioning use, and improving the performance of electric vehicles (heat is not a good friend of batteries).

"Forging exists, it is a living trade, that is why I do not ask for support or subsidies, since we have been doing the same thing for 175 years," says Sergi Cadenas, fifth generation of a family dedicated to artistic forging in Girona since the mid-nineteenth century. His unique premises, Ferros de Arte Cadenas, crosses a block and connects Calle Nou (shop) with Calle Sant Francesc (forging). An activity that is a priori noisy and dirty but survives in the city centre. "I have filters above the regulations and the hammer mounted on a silencing block. I could start chopping from 8 in the morning, but I don't because I am aware that I am in the middle of a city. I have never received any complaints from the neighbours."

It is a pity – not for us alone, but for the whole world – that we do not have more of a taste for our Gothic painting. Romanesque is certainly more accessible to us because of the influence it had on the avant-garde of the 20th century, Catalan painting which, due to temporal proximity, we value more. But what a pleasure we miss by not celebrating painters like Bernat Martorell or Lluís Borrassà to the same extent!