Bartosz Beda’s Mirage began at Angelo State University, during a residency awarded through the Edwards Trust family fellowship. What found him there were the beaked yuccas. Native to the Chihuahuan Desert of West Texas, they lined the campus pathways blasted by streetlamps against pitch black. Washed of their colors. He photographed them and carried them into the studio. Not as landscape. As apparition. Through handmade stencils he abstracted them into the philosophy of painting inside landscape reality. A landscape does not need to be rendered to be real. It needs to be felt.

A mirage is a longing given shape. Something seen because it is wanted. These paintings hold that tension. A resting place inside the rush of life, there and not there at once. What we fail to notice does not disappear. It waits. It becomes illusion. It becomes memory. It becomes the things we knew, but forgot.