I see Ximena Maldonado Sánchez painting deserts that feel hot at the touch of the eye. They are not barren cactuses but burning images. Her works throb with the same force as heat radiating off a scorched plain at noon. The forms are not so much observed as remembered by the earth. Even in darkness, her cacti glow with the memory of a hot day, struck by dry lightning; even in stillness, the hills ripple. I do not look at her landscapes; I feel looked at by them. An eerie warning hums beneath her surfaces: stay away from the desert if you do not belong to it.
Oil and acrylic on canvas
180 x 130 cm
Courtesy Bernier-Eliades Gallery,
Athens 2025
Photo by Boris Kirpotin
The radiation of her palette is the first sign. Her colors do not mimic natural tones; they alter them through exposure. Pale violets, sallow greens, acidic oranges, bruised pinks, and scorched blacks suggest that something chemical has occurred—a hallucination, a fever of a thirsty day. If memory were heat-sensitive film, these paintings would be its reaction. The result is not a memory of place but a visual record of what that place emits.
I find the nightscapes especially strange. Unlike the cooling dark of traditional landscape painting, the kind I expect from night, Maldonado’s nocturnes are heated chambers remembering the scorching sun. The background is not sky but residue—dense, absorbing, and about to ignite. Plant life glows like radioactive coral. Shadows are rendered as surface texture rather than depth, and cacti seem fossilized mid-motion. I do not encounter these plants as specimens but as afterimages.
Her recurring motif—the cactus or shrubby flora—rises in opposition to nothing. There is no struggle in her wilderness, only survival through intensity. The ground does not support life; it mirrors it. In many pieces, the bare canvas is left exposed, not as unfinished space but as glare. Light becomes an actor. Glare is not the absence of paint; it is a form of blindness.
In these paintings, Maldonado is not documenting a place. She is translating an atmosphere that knows itself. The desert is not a mute witness, but a speaker. It murmurs in dry layers. It pulses through color. It sees itself.
Ximena reminds me of Georgia O’Keeffe‘s works and Ana Mendieta‘s photography. But she breaks away from influence, from O’Keeffe’s clean, nearly sterile brush. O’Keeffe’s landscapes are acts of reverence and clarity; Maldonado’s are acts of estrangement, saturation, and hallucination.
It may seem strange to compare Ximena’s work with Ana Mendieta’s photography, but they both come from the same Latin American art cloth. Mendieta’s engagement with land, exile, and bodily presence in natural space offers a thematic parallel. Maldonado’s paintings bring the metaphor to conclusion and suggest that the desert is not landscape but a body—scarred, pulsing, reactive, radioactive.
