CROSSING SECTIONS

The desert doesn't invite you. It simply exists — and you decide whether to enter.

I entered it a few times with the eyes of someone raised surrounded by the abundant green of Brazil, by the memory of the Amazon and by the idea of a nature so lush it is almost excessive. Perhaps that is why this high-contrast monochrome fascinates me so much. The desert hypnotises. Sometimes it hallucinates.

I crossed sections of sand, of stone, of silence. By car, often with no clear destination, following what the road offered and what the light promised. The heat rising off the asphalt, cutting through the emptiness. The hard, seemingly endless walk between dunes. The hot wind that comes before a sandstorm. The cold that arrives without warning when the sun disappears and the sky turns into a sea of stars.

In the desert, light doesn't illuminate — it sculpts.

It builds volume where there appears to be nothing. It pushes horizons away, dissolves distance, turns thousands of grains of sand into a single vibrating surface. The contrast is almost violent: shadow and brightness with no middle ground. Monochrome tones that complete one another. Warm and cold coexisting with no transition.

Against that scale, I feel small.

But it is precisely in that smallness that I find a form of presence. The desert cuts distraction, strips away excess and confronts the eye with what remains. Time, space, matter and light.

Crossing Sections was born from those lived crossings. Real crossings, recorded with the camera and now held on paper and in memory. Crossed sections of light, of time, of landscape — and of myself.

This is an ongoing series.

The desert still calls, and I will cross it again.