The canvas has become a lake. Pink pigments have been diluted and currents of water generated through movement and gravity. I immerse myself in the abstract images happening before me. Water’s poetic imagination.

Evaporation has taken over the pictorial process. The paint has crackled; it has been superimposed in layers, making its materiality emerge. I am dazzled by the visual beauty of light that makes color present. Fire’s poetic imagination.

The machine turns itself into an artist and the painter’s hand has emerged as robotic. Painting with a height complex has become possible thanks to technology. I rise above this landscape rendered of a place outside the topos, whether utopian or dystopian. Air’s poetic imagination.

The floor has been covered with salt. The rustle of footsteps turns the gaze downward; I am no longer the eagle but rather the earthly serpent, and like Atlas I hold the celestial dome on my shoulders. Earth’s poetic imagination.

In Greek, arché means ultimate principle. The philosophy of Parmenides postulated four: water, fire, air, and earth. Aristotle added a fifth, Ether. Ontologically discarded by subsequent scientific paradigms, this latter shares the ambiguity of its existence with that experience lived after inhabiting Vilabelda’s proposal. I have faced the uncertainty of his images in order eventually to reveal the immanence of the imagined in the real.

Ethereal are the certainties of our world and of Common Ground, the magenta landscape of our era. 

-Verónica Guerrero Molina