BERNIER / ELIADES GALLERY PRESENTS XIMENA MALDONADO SÁNCHEZ “CARDÓN, CARMÍN Y OLA”

There’s a pulse to this landscape—not one you can trace on a map, but one you feel in the body. Deep reds, ocean blues, forms that twist and bloom like memory. Ximena Maldonado Sánchez paints from that place where the desert meets the sea, where cactus spines echo coral branches, and colour carries the charge of emotion. The works seem to breathe—they unfold like terrain, textured and alive, shaped by water, wind, and movement. You don’t so much view them as enter them.

Cardón, carmín y ola is a conversation between land and ocean, rooted in the artist’s physical relationship to place. Her process begins outdoors, in the presence of landscape, and becomes an embodied act of painting. Figuration and abstraction blend in waves, revealing unseen links between ecosystems and human presence. There’s an ecological tenderness here, a sense of reciprocity and rhythm. Like the cardón cactus, the work is both resilient and porous—holding space for intensity, for softness, for the wild intelligence of the earth itself.