When we look at the sky, we are contemplating the past of the cosmos: millions of years contained in celestial bodies that shine with their own light before slowly fading into darkness. That transition between light and shadow—that invisible center, latent at the core of the universe—is the central theme that Mareo Rodríguez (Mexico City, 1981) presents in Portals.

Mareo has taken hold of light and transformed it into matter through his work, guiding us on a journey that begins in the stars and descends into the depths of the Earth. He is an artist who observes the world with the eyes of a geologist, discovering in the Earth’s fractures a way to convey his sensitivity. His work becomes a tribute to nature itself.

To gaze at the stars is more than a biological act—it is a spiritual practice. This is where the essence of Rodríguez’s work, shaped through more than a decade of artistic practice, comes into focus.

Portals is also a wound. The transitions he proposes in each painting, installation, intervention, and audiovisual piece carry an aim to heal. In Malta, Rodríguez discovered a geological richness embedded in the structure of Valletta Contemporary, a museum housed in stone and full of cavities. By revealing these fissures, he uncovered both a wound and a path forward—a portal.

The act of opening and closing cracks, of opening and closing wounds, becomes metaphorical in this exhibition. Rodríguez merges the architecture of the space with his work, placing us at a center from which we can glimpse the essence he has drawn from the landscapes he has traversed—an essence that reveals the sublime and the magnificence of nature. Fragmentation—of territory, of spirit, of body—transforms into beams of light that meet the viewer along the path through Rituals, a show that distills the artist’s essence into a multisensory experience.

While each piece in the exhibition is unique, Portals functions as a spatial experience that activates relationships, associations, and resonances between them—not bound by a dominant historical perspective, but instead highlighting the creative process and the materiality of each work.

His paintings experiment with canvas and linen using acrylic, enamel, and gold leaf, creating the palette that defines his artistic language: a monochromatic universe illuminated by golden rays. Large-scale installations in polystyrene and light—both artificial LED and natural, filtering through the cracks of the building—converge to form a monumental fissure that expands within Valletta Contemporary.

Infinity—like the stars, like light or darkness, like the immensity of the unknown, which is nothing but life itself—takes shape in this portal, constructed by Rodríguez in the minimalist form of an ellipse, representing both beginning and end. Portals is an invitation to see from the other side, a perspective urgently needed in times when much of the world is immersed in darkness and chaos. There is a crack in everything—that is how the light gets in.

Destiny is a word which sometimes conjures up the idea of good fortune and sometimes bad. In addition, it is a striking, provocative word, which is one of the most noteworthy characteristics of Fate, an exhibition which brings together 35 photographs from the most representative series of the artist and photographer Roger Ballen (New York, 1950), who is noted for portraying the strange and almost monstrous reality of the inhabitants of rural and suburban areas of South Africa.

This is an exhibition that invites the viewer to confront the dichotomy inherent in this term. Roger Ballen takes the cards, shuffles them and invites us to play. What is the game? Everyone can choose their own, because his pictures are inclined to reflect on everything. Ballen gives us the data and then everyone develops their own meaning from them.

It is difficult to determine where Roger Ballen’s photographic universe begins and where it ends, but there is a definite coexistence of pain and hope in his work. His exploration, which is not so much creative as human, has led him to develop different series, each more abstract than the one before, in which people, objects and animals build disquieting and magical relationships, with a prominent representation of the absurd, a discourse on the fate that lives and dies in the eyes of the inhabitants of these suburbs, day after day.

Taking pictures is a science and an art which Ballen understands very well. Since the age of 13, when his mother was hired as a graphic editor for the Magnum agency, he has been in contact with photography. It was a passion that grew as the years went by and which, eventually, when his studies as a geologist took him to South Africa in the 1980s, reached maturity. Thus came about the starting point of a career that currently spans forty-five years and which has resulted in one of the most moving, unique and distinctive bodies of photographic works in recent years throughout the world.

Roger Ballen is a miner who concerns himself with digging into the deeper parts of the human mind so as to generate “strong psychological statements”, as he put it in one of his latest interviews. This is why the meaning behind his work is complex but at the same time sufficient for each of us who encounters it to understand that he is an artist who does not follow the general parameters of art, but rather establishes his own.

He has created his own world, he lives there, and with his pictures he has made a door so as to invite us to see that world, which is so crippling and exquisitely strange, and which does not go unnoticed but rather becomes installed inside those who see it. He compels us to open our eyes and be aware of what lies beyond the walls. With the uniqueness that characterises his work, he portrays a version of the human condition which is so disturbing that trying to understand the true meaning of reality, or even, of beauty, becomes a revelatory experience.

Roger Ballen uses the skills of a speaker or writer to evoke emotions and feelings through his photographs, which are always square and in black and white. His work has enabled us to understand that we come from the night and always go back to it with a clearer idea of what fate is. He is a man who does not like to think in words, but who has established a body of work that is presented to us as a statement and also afforded a beauty so sublime that, contradictorily, it makes the world appear a less harmful place to live in. So, as with destiny, everyone has to decide whether to accept or resist it.