The dead waters of life and dreams. Moving to Madrid in the middle of a pandemic has been a dream come true. Travels to the Balearic Islands and Canary Islands helped me remember my relationship with the horizon, calming my soul. I feel a deep connection with the ocean. Sometimes, my imagination navigates with the same elasticity as water. With the Moon in Pisces, my imagination is deep, confusing, and poetic.

In this series, Aguas Muertas, a return to black, a detail that I had ignored for years. Water is an irresistible and continuous source of birth. I mix the viscosity of acrylic to give movement to the thought and play with the finishes between matte, satin, and gloss, forming color and shape densities. The need to seduce through color and gestural strokes piques my curiosity about the pictorial formality this series develops. By "brincar el charco" (that's how we say it in Puerto Rico when the Atlantic Ocean is crossed), I rediscovered my passion for basting and small-format painting, of an autobiographical nature, on linen. In these works made during my residence in La Gomera, I managed to express the pain, intrigue, and transformation experienced when moving to a new country.

Death is a beginning that the human condition fears. Creating a new image allows the spirit to channel the loss. Creating a different direction opens the way and doors to the unknown. Like the bed of a river, it sometimes overflows and destroys its surroundings to give way to beginnings, new life, and fresh water.

Abstraction consists of creating images that live in the subconscious. Therefore, I quote Gastón Bachelard in El Agua y los Sueños to express this idea: "It is necessary to pursue those images that are born of ourselves, that live in our dreams, those images loaded with a dreamlike and dense matter that is an inexhaustible breath for the material imagination." (p. 35)

The magic of La Gomera is inexplicable. Its serenity and energetic intensity can be witnessed from the moment you step on the ground. To get to this island, I traveled south of Tenerife and took the ferry from Los Cristianos, which took me to San Sebastián, the island's capital.

The Island of Enchanted Sunsets, overlooking the silence of the Atlantic, has a varied ecosystem that abruptly changes from desert to subtropical forest. Sometimes it receives intense winds from the Sahara. My paintings capture serenity. They are abstractions of panoramic views, of the dark reality of the premises, and of the shadow under which the Canarian panorama lives in relation to the peninsula.

The eruption of the volcano on Cumbre Vieja in La Palma could be seen from afar. I felt a wake-up call and a rebirth of consciousness. This series consists of small canvases (24 cm x 33 cm) on linen, painted with acrylic directly from the container, like another tourist who buys the packaged culture of a colonized island.

The paintings have a pop-art air, with abstract gestures and a combination of neon colors against solid black backgrounds. They suggest the sublime, that feeling of connection that I felt when I came into contact with the nature of La Gomera. They are maps of memory, memories of experiences, and acts of meditation. My creative process requires control and discipline. Each layer of paint has its own drying time, allowing you to preserve the colors in a pure way.

The purity of each stain preserves its essence with lightness and precision. After spending nine months studying for a master's degree in virtual and augmented reality and dedicating long hours in front of a computer, my stay in La Gomera allowed me to experiment and paint without a brush, capturing a new perspective on the color on the canvas.

In the midst of the pandemic, this was my respite, my awakening, my change of artistic direction - reconnecting with painting, with air, and with ancestral lands.