In the retelling that is done all the time of the plastic arts, painting has been considered dead and reborn, and although it is true that it is difficult to imagine art without painting, in its long and prolific journey between abundance of styles, successes and occurrences, sometimes it seems that there is no answer to its death; Nevertheless, it is always pleasant to come across proposals that assume the pictorial fact as a serious resource, even with great possibilities to justify its protagonism, either from the silence imposed by abstraction or from the narrative that, protected by the execution involved in a tacit and faithful agreement with the form, is fed with concepts to project other realities.

In this last journey we find the explicit painting of Elba Rhoads (Tijuana, Baja California, 1959), an artwork placed under the close scrutiny of an eye educated to place in the specific place the soft and descriptive brushstroke; patiently elaborated through the rhetoric for the fidelity of the form; a work proposed from the distance of chance, in which she adds the intention of ungraspable acts, of mental states, of presuppositions, turning it into a game that liberates readings towards unheard of fields, towards inexplicable paths.

Some years ago, in a reading of her work, she said that "they are works that go beyond the represented reality, that induce provocation, challenge, that urge to disturb the obvious and this could also be a range that moves them away from conventional realism and axiomatic discourse"; it is, I can assert it today before these pieces that superimpose form, time and space to justify themselves in other realities.

The author's concern with seeking to represent the individual on his or her different planes, in the same space and time (Individuos (in)divisibles, 2016). The idea of quantum physics, with which seeks to propose narratives that generate other forms of interpretation, creates conditions that lead us to question the reality or realities that converge in the same individual and to question the space and time in which this character is found, all of this in a supposed analogy with the interrelationship of the whole, the non-separability of objects, as proposed by quantum physics; that is, the idea that an object can be in two or more places at the same time.

It is certainly not a simple challenge to represent, however, it is possible to understand it when we have before us artworks such as Supersymmetries (2017), a piece that proposes a character (seen, at the same time, from different angles) in the same time and space; where the character(s) are not shaped or described as completely independent entities, but are considered as elements of a whole (the principle of non-separability). Or it can be seen from hypothetical symmetries (supersymmetry) with which it solves the problem of hierarchy and gives equity to the parts (the individual, time and space).

This work is entirely dedicated to Marta Palau in gratitude for her considerations towards her production, for her disinterested participation in the projection of Baja California artists to the world, and in particular, in recognition of her innovative and propositional production, which has had a decisive influence on the path of contemporary art in the entity.

Roberto Rosique. Curator.