As one investigates Desmond Lazaro’s artistic journey, much of it is through map-making – exploring both his personal mapping (which has been a complex one), but one that has also transcended into the journeys of explorer’s, star maps and the wider cosmos, he continually looks into how we reimagine the universe within our own microcosmic journey.
Lazaro’s recent series, ‘Cosmos’, gestures towards transcendence without missing a single visceral beat. Painstakingly created with natural pigments, ground by the artist in his studio and burnished with agate, these paintings could function as tools of consciousness. These paintings, an outcome of extensive research of medieval manuscripts, encyclopaedias, alchemical treatises and investigations into astrophysics, were born in bereavement. With the death of his beloved mother in 2018, Lazaro would often scan the sky, wondering if he might find her there. But then the artist had an epiphany that he was “looking in the wrong direction… the greater metaphysical mystery remains on the other end of the telescope: who and what is doing the looking?”

- An excerpt from a longer text by Nancy Adajania, 2022