By Francisco Mata

"This is where dreams are rebounded," reads a marker at the last limit of Mexico, the line that shelters the mythical north, the magnetic pole toward which the rusty needle of the sub-continental aspirations are oriented. The dreams are multiplied by multiplying images that deform the face of the dreamer, as in a truco de feria: identity altered and repeated by a convex mirror.

The photographs of Francisco Mata Rosas that make up this series emerge directly from that world of arched appearances and twisted identities, crossed by the long and sinuous scar of the border. Of course, these are images that transcend mere testimonial eagerness: we are not before the prosaic record of a reality that we already know is stormy, but before a sensitivity capable of building the exact metonymy of border homelessness and violence through the vestiges that leave the migrants on their way to the north, or fix the abandonment of areas eaten by narcotrafficking through the ruins and tombs that erect the landscape.

The border has gained fame as a place of extravagant imagery where kitsch is the dominant note of a syncopated melody of bullets. Mata Rosas evades this convention to show us a deeper, less ornamental absurdity; a fundamentally political absurdity whose iconographic derivations alter - and do not amuse - the spectator. And it does so by taking advantage of a variety of resources such that they place it far from the stupid superstition of "technique by technique" that still placates some contemporary photographers.

Jumping from one format to another, from an epiphanic record (in "Maruchan", to give an example) to a rough humor ("Calacas"), Mata Rosas shows us a multiple border; complex and constantly reinvented by the people who cross it in spite of all risk. More than impressions, we are offered authentic theses, intuitions that crumble our relationship with that hinge, the very line: a cliff of dreams and fertile soil of not a few nightmares.

–Daniel Saldaña París