In the Hebrew biblical tradition, the term ruach means the vital breath, the air breathed by every living thing; the same divine breath that blown life into man at the dizzying moment of creation. The term is similar to prana in Hinduism, to the Greek pneuma and the soul of Christians. This breath flows through living things and is somehow an infinite network – invisible, undetectable – that covers the entire living universe now and since ever. It was not Beatriz de la Rua´s intention to illustrate this concept at all. However, the notion of soul is difficult to avoid in her latest work. For some time, she has refused figurative or pictorial narratives; instead, she chooses a more subtle and metaphorical form of expression; that is to say, detailed graphics and repetition of modules. In each square of paper she draws different structures, which have subtle differences among them – a knotted wire, spirals, columns joined by hooks, stormy seas, the eye of a hurricane, zigzags, columns entangled in rings, eight-spoke wheels (that remind us of the representation of the eightfold path preached by Buddha), a thicket of curls and even broken tiles depicting a work of Gaudi. None of these descriptions are the intended by the artist, regardless I intend to use them to demonstrate their enormous evocative power. I can not help thinking that each design is a form of existence of a living being. How are these graphics displayed? In rows, one next to the other, but with empty intervals in between, as if the soul embodied in a column – I imagine a stable and measured being; or in a whirlpool (shaky and restless); or in any other thing – as if the soul needed an interval of time, without time, of rest and immanence. The minute and concentrated detail and the repetition of these modules make us think that de la Rua´s work depicts a mantra, and as such, it is a leap of consciousness that allows us to transcend the barriers of reason. The work seems to represent the unrepresentable. “It is better to keep silent than to talk about something we can not talk about”, wisely said the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Hence, our artist has chosen a means of expression that is both sound and ambiguous; it is a map of existence that may or simply may not be.