The masterwork offers a brilliant visual critique that expands the boundaries of contemporary conceptual cartography. This commanding mixed media painting blends an archival photograph on canvas with meticulous hand-painted acrylic details, staging a philosophical discourse around colonial exploration, conquest, and territorial borders. Miguel Ángel Ríos confines a historical map within a prominent dashed red and black circle, from which a complex, dense grid of white radial lines shoots out across a velvety black backdrop. This calculated composition yields a magnetic geometric gravity while successfully deconstructing Western notions of geographic boundaries.
In the late nineties, and after traveling to regions as diverse as the Amazon basin and the Chihuahua desert, Ríos began to develop a body of work through which he addressed the meaning of hallucinogenic plants in the indigenous cultures of the American continent; a new cartography of the Americas but this time through other means of representation that account for the artist's subjective voyage into the territories of alterity. This art work it’s part of the collection of Bernardino Arocha and Mrs.Ríos chose to use specific mediums for the “documentation” of each experience. A series of drawings made under the influence of the Peyote cactus convey in the manner of automatic writing the delirium of the artist under the effects of the drug.
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