Painting
2019–2025
Land of mist and salt: oil on paper where crowds advance, remain, or dissolve into a territory that keeps the memory of those who crossed it.
The landscape opens like a desert breathing salt and movement. The tones never settle: they ripple as if the ground were also water. The shadows are not mere effects of light — they organise themselves, repeat, suggest presences. Walkers advance from an undefined distance, or cross a time that never manages to close. Mist and fissures act as the memory of the territory, as if the landscape kept within itself the trace of those who passed through. Those who come from afar names not a place but a state: memory, time, and landscape overlap until they become inseparable. And in that overlapping, between what is shown and what is only sensed, a discreet but persistent certainty emerges — on this territory, solitude cannot hold.
The path advances like a promise. Its colours announce no arrival but a passage, a vibration pushing towards the horizon where something — or someone — seems to wait, or to gather what was scattered. No stillness is possible: everything in this scene evokes movement, as if the whole world had been set walking. The loaded figures, the families, the mules carrying what can still be taken compose a choreography of urgency and continuity. It is an exodus that does not merely leave a place: it invents another one as it unfolds. The unknown stops being a threat and becomes a shared destiny, a provisional form of home in the making. Those who arrive silently questions its own genealogy: are we the great-grandchildren of immigrants or the children of the land we believe we inhabit? In that hesitation the true matter of the landscape reveals itself — a world in perpetual transformation where humanity, deprived of definitive maps, improvises its belonging while continuing to walk.
The path reappears, but without the intensity of the journey. The colours fade, as if movement had given way to an uncertain permanence. The figures now seem settled or lost, suspended between having arrived and no longer knowing where to go, while the horizon remains immutable, distant, like an idea that persists more than a goal.
The landscape radiates upwards, as if the earth could no longer contain what it shelters: a continuous explosion that announces not collapse but excess. Within that overflowing force, human figures come closer, as if the extraordinary had been absorbed by the everyday. There is neither surprise nor withdrawal, only an almost practical proximity to what exceeds any attempt at control.
It looks like water, it looks like a memory. I can make out a few gathered figures, so diffuse that I do not know whether they are there or merely a projection of my desire. Like a dream that persists on waking, whose whole story we cannot remember.
Mother of the fish, protector of boats, and mistress of destiny.
Part of the installation When the desert reclaims (2026). The presence of lithium points to the extraction of natural resources and the transformations it imposes on territories.