There is a particular kind of discomfort that Gottfried Helnwein has made his life's work. Not the discomfort of the obscure or the deliberately provocative, but the specific, quiet unease that arrives when something you thought you knew turns slightly wrong. A child's face. A cartoon duck. A familiar image from the archive of collective memory, returned to you at an angle that makes your stomach drop. That is the sensation at the centre of Mundos Invertidos, the Austrian artist's first major retrospective in Spain, now open at SOLO Independencia in Madrid.

The title translates simply: inverted worlds. But the phrase carries more weight than its syllables suggest. It names the feeling, increasingly common, of looking at the world and thinking: no. This cannot be how things are. This cannot be happening again. Helnwein has been painting that feeling for decades, long before it became the ambient mood of the present moment. Which makes this show, gathering around fifty works from a dozen European collections, feel less like a retrospective and more like a reckoning.

Born in Vienna in the years immediately following the Second World War, Helnwein grew up in a city still living under the shadow of the Nazi period. Adults did not sing. Houses were grey and long-faced. The architecture of trauma was everywhere, unacknowledged and pervasive. Into that silence arrived something extraordinary: American comic books, produced as part of a cultural re-education programme in the occupied zones. Carl Barks's Donald Duck stories, in particular, hit the young Helnwein like a physical force. He has described opening that first comic book as the moment everything changed, the first experience of colour and speed and something resembling joy. That a cartoon duck could do that to a child born into postwar rubble tells you something about the power of image, and it tells you something about why Helnwein has spent the rest of his career interrogating that power with such rigour and such seriousness.

The Donald Duck room at SOLO is one of the show's most deliberate gestures. The works there are drawn from his ongoing series entitled Disasters of War, a direct reference to Goya, and the conversation between those two artists, separated by two centuries, is one of the exhibition's most charged undercurrents. Helnwein's position is clear: war today is entertainment. The line between cinematic spectacle and documented atrocity has been made deliberately thin. Leaders brag about body counts the way others might discuss box office results. Propaganda, Helnwein argues, is the primary weapon in any conflict, because mass violence requires mass insanity, and mass insanity requires preparation. He studied the Holocaust with the urgency of someone who understood it was a family matter, whose parents' generation bore responsibility for it, and what he found was a detailed instruction manual for how ordinary people get turned. He believes those instructions are being followed again.

And yet the show at SOLO is not a pamphlet. It is an artwork, and the distinction matters. Helnwein's chosen language is the image of the child, and it is a choice he returns to with what he calls inner necessity. The child is defenceless by definition. The child is also, in the 21st century, a soldier: seventeen and eighteen year-olds trained to kill people they do not know, in wars they did not choose. The wounded child and the child with a gun are, in Helnwein's work, the same child. That is the argument, and it is made not in text but in paint, in scale, in the particular quality of attention he brings to a face.

SOLO Independencia is not a white cube. It was designed by Juanos and carries in its bones the taste and logic of a private collection, accumulated with care and over time. The curators, working closely with Sebastian and the gallery's own holdings, have placed Helnwein's work in direct dialogue with around thirty other artists: Ai Weiwei, Takashi Murakami, whose goldfish carry the memory of Tokyo being bombed, Japanese artists from the 70s whose treatment of the female figure was, in its own context, an act of cultural rupture. There are guns made from typewriters, one entitled Geneva Convention, another named Remington, the latter a reminder that the same American company manufactured both the weapon and the writing instrument. The propaganda point, made in steel and dark humour.

The sensation of moving through the rooms is cumulative. Helnwein's large-format paintings, lit in near-darkness, appear to generate their own light. Characters you recognise from a lifetime of cultural consumption return to you wrong, and the wrongness is the point. Red Duck watches from the corner. A figure from a Los Angeles opera production, now in its first appearance as sculpture, stands in a stairwell. The mural behind it was already there. Nothing in the space is incidental.

What Helnwein has built over his career is not a body of protest art in the conventional sense. Protest art announces its intentions and asks for your agreement. This work does something harder: it invites you to stay with what you would prefer to leave. It asks you to sit with the image of the wounded child not as symbol but as fact, as something happening now, as something that happened to your city, your century, your species. The invitation to conversation that runs through the whole show is real, and it is serious. Mundos Invertidos opens at SOLO Independencia at a moment when the title might as well be a news headline. Helnwein, to his credit, has always known it would come to this.

We are grateful to SOLO for the incredible experience of exploring both their Madrid spaces and for such an avant-garde vision of art as something you truly live inside.