At present, Mariano Rodríguez has not produced new photographic or audiovisual material. In an interview for IMMAGO MAGAZINE, he declared to have destroyed all his work, including prints, digital files, and negatives. The images shown in the sections Photography and Phone were recovered from different portals that still preserve part of his work. He also decided leave the artistic field, arguing that contemporary art has lost its aesthetic character, deviating into the absurd and the banal. According to the author, today’s art has been reduced to a gesture that can only provoke repulsion in the observer. In 2024, after years of exploring other artistic languages, Mariano returned to painting as returns to an intimate and forgotten territory. His canvases became stages where the human figure fractures and recomposes, displaced by strokes that do not seek to delineate but to question. In the series Strange Creatures, the body appears distorted, concealing within its stains and fragments a symbolic violence that does not immediately reveal itself but remains encrypted on the surface. Each work is an echo of the original gesture, preserved with digital precision yet sustained in the fragility of the analog. The final piece rests upon an immaculate surface that, in its purity, grants the viewer the artist’s ultimate gesture of clemency. There, upon that technical altar simulating neutrality, an intimate dialogue is established —not with the eyes, but with the mind— a secret exchange between the creative mind and the created work. In 2025, he decided to publish Fuego Fatuo, an epistolary tale of deep philosophical and poetic resonance, whose epilogue ties the story to the theatrical work El Hombre Inmoral, an adaptation that, in the author’s words, allowed him to bring the essence of the original narrative to the stage. That same year, he presented Liturgia de los condenados, a play that concludes the trilogy “La Muerte de las Musas, composed of the two works mentioned before. The piece unfolds as an existential duel between Azrion and Edranea, two archetypal figures whose intertwined voices create a space of mystical, erotic, and philosophical tension. The work was adapted into a narrative structure to facilitate reading, with theater director Eleonora Moreau narrating the text. At the same time, Mariano began writing his second poetry book, Juro Arrastrarla por los Mares. In a significant shift, the work abandons the female figure as its central source of inspiration to embrace a broader and more philosophical exploration of existence. While the woman remains present as a symbol in certain compositions, His role now forms part of a bigger picture that includes fragility, time, and the search for meaning in a world marked by the ephemeral. The literary style combines lyrical narrative with an almost theatrical tension.