In April 2025, I traveled for the first time to Baja California, Mexico, a landscape I had long imagined. What I encountered was not simply a place, but a threshold: a territory where desert and Pacific converge in radical stillness. Monumental cardon cacti punctuate the horizon; the mineral density of the earth and the vast, uncontained sky destabilize conventional perceptions of scale and duration. Time expands. Silence becomes material.

Upon returning to the studio, the experience was not represented but metabolized. Deserts emerged as a body of work oscillating between abstraction and figuration, where landscape operates less as image and more as presence. Works such as Espejismo (Mirage), Cardones, and When Thorns Become Stars function as translations, not of geography, but of atmosphere, tension, and altered temporality.

Baja California remains, for me, an open field of return: a site where perception is continually reconfigured.