It’s hard to say whether this drawing depicts a continuous space or if the woman bent over, bathed in light, is imagined by the man on the couch. The opening to the adjacent room, from where the light floods in, sways along the edges, bending as if the shadows were curtains pulled back by the vision. And though the figures nearly touch, the contrast between the areas of light and shadow that engulf them; the interiority implied by both their postures; and the way the composition is balanced, countering the teetering a triangle stood on its point (the woman) with the solidity of one sat on its side (the man), creates an immeasurable distance between them, turning each into the other’s extreme. The drawing is inspired by Goya’s “Caprichos” and bears particular resemblance to No. 43 in the sequence, “The sleep of reason produces monsters,” which itself may have been based on the frontispiece to 1793 edition of Rousseau’s “Oeuvres Complètes.” The figure in Canales’ version, however, is neither lost to the demons of sleep nor gripped by the throes of inspired creation. Instead, he shares the blank expression of Degas’ drinkers, one of those embodiments of Ennui who, like living ghosts, wait for their oblivion. The drawing’s title—“Barburner”—confirms this reading, but the meaning of the woman remains ambiguous. She also recalls Degas, his pastels of women bathing bent awkwardly over a low tub, only here she is turned away from the viewer and the feeling is less one of intimacy than of estrangement, a growing silence. She exists apart, and the gulf cannot be breached. Desire appears and runs through the image (in the pulsing color of the shadows, the meandering touch of the line), but finds no consummation, remains still unextinguished. Why, then, must it exist?—This seems to me what the drawing is asking.