Carmen gazes far into the distance. It is not that she is not good at looking closely, but she is so allured by horizons that her gaze is lost in what is beyond. It is a way to escape, to in- vent a better life. As a child, it was something she needed. She was shy and withdrawn. She wrote backwards. She held a mir- ror image of the world. Painting was a path to her interior, the self-knowledge of what lies deep inside.

“I need horizons to escape”, she says, even today, more than 40 years after her first exhibition.

Carmen likes to be outside, in the sun, and also up high, on rooftops, on the hills by the sea, where horizons are best appre- ciated. The point where sky and earth merge is also a vanishing point. There is a mystery there, but it is not the one Carmen is most interested in. She prefers the mystery that envelops us. She calls it atmosphere.

Atmosphere is light, the life that hovers between what is visible and invisible. You can’t see it, but you can sense it. It sticks to our eyes like a dream, and the dream takes us into an alternative, transcendental reality.

Carmen paints quickly, on the fly, guided by a curiosity that can wander anywhere. She doesn’t know where the place will be, but she is sure she will find it. And once there, she takes out her brushes or pencils and captures the instant on paper.

At that moment, in the absence of movement, what is hidden, intangible and spiritual, what is most human, surfaces.

There is a horizon between people’s interior and their exterior. It is a line of equilibrium enveloped in an atmosphere of magical light. Carmen knows it very well. It is where she lives.