Kevin Mancera compiles drawings made throughout different moments of his life, which have emerged as an answer to deep experiences, intimate or collective, such as love and its loss, war and its devastation, death and its mystery.

The title resonates in all those possible landscapes: facing the end of a relationship, the silence that follows violence, the certainty of death, there remains an arid territory, a void we inevitably inhabit. But in that desert also grows something: a search for meaning, a break, the intuition that crisis is itself, an awakening.

For Mancera, this drawing series is shelter and catharsis. He does not draw on misery to produce images, nor does he seek to create propaganda. Instead, he chooses to be a filter: letting what moves him, whether the breaking of a bond or an extreme sociopolitical event, settles into lines that seek not to explain, but to relieve. For him, drawing is a way of processing what hurts, what disconcerts, what beats inside and outside of himself.

In this series, there is no planning, no predetermined beginning and end as in his other projects. The drawings arise when the need arises: days of silence are suddenly broken by a succession of images. Sometimes, he does not know what he is drawing until the image already exists. It is an intimate, almost secret process, which now opens to the viewer like a vital archive: fragments of thoughts, emotions, and awakenings recorded on paper.

With these pieces, the artist allows himself what rarely happens in his life: to let go of control. It is not about technical precision or calculation but about surrendering to the urgency of the gesture. Drawing becomes escape and revelation, a practice that expects nothing more than to let flow.

Todo esto será un desierto (All this will be a desert) is a meeting place. Where the artist throws his images, the viewer finds the possibility to read, to recognize themselves, to speak with the crises and silences we all share. The desert that awaits at the end of everything is not only empty: it is also fertile ground for what awakens.

(Text by Paula Builes)