Our Drive

“A painter is a man who paints what he sells. An artist, on the other hand, is a man who sells what he paints,” Picasso once declared with certainty. The early works of the famed painter were not sold for exorbitant sums, yet in 2023 one of his paintings was auctioned for 140 million dollars. This does not mean Picasso’s work lacked value before — rather, time gave us the chance to recognize it. In that sense, it seems that culture and the arts have taught us that the value of a work lies only in how much it costs — in how much it can be sold for.

But we believe that artistic value transcends such parameters. For artistic creation has taught us to see the world differently, to give meaning to our emotions, and to lead ourselves toward an encounter with our own being.

“The beautiful is difficult,” declared Socrates — yet Lezama Lima, millennia later, replied: “Only what is difficult is stimulating. Only the resistance that challenges us is capable of arching, awakening, and sustaining our power of knowledge.”

Thus, art presents itself as a journey — a voyage, even an odyssey of arduous trials — but in the end, it is a discovery of our own emotions, virtues, and flaws. Many artists create through analogy; others, metaphorically, by reimagining both the real world and the world of ideas. We seek to bring those ideas into culture — to let those visions infuse our lives. For our land is not exempt from such imagination. We are children of the desert — proud and majestic as a lion; heirs to the ancient, unyielding aridity: a land of dragons.

We know that in the northwest of Mexico, within the Tijuana–San Diego corridor, multiple cultures coexist — we are, by nature, a multicultural region. This mosaic of cultures has shaped a unique way of seeing the world, of living along this border where people on both sides are constantly connected through crossings, migration, commerce, and cuisine. Art, therefore, is not exempt from the multicultural essence that defines the frontier.

Artists here create from a vision of the world unbound from their places of origin — they reimagine reality through a new lens. We seek to bring these proposals to the rest of the world, trusting deeply in the creative potential of our artists.

Popular culture tells us that the artist must live for their art. At LYDRA, we agree — yet we also believe in the artist’s power to live from their art. That is why we aim to allow artists to dedicate themselves fully to creation, while we take on the task of finding the right audience for their work. We are moved by the thought that these cultural expressions from the SoCal–Baja California border may find a place within the international community — representing our art, our land, and our imagination across the world.

Antonio Escalante (2025), Paisaje con montaña.