Around the mirror, the composition expands beyond the human and the earthly into a celestial dimension.

Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and Saturn inhabit the surrounding space, transforming the painting into a dialogue between the intimate and the cosmic.

Some of these celestial forms appear to cross the boundary of the mirror itself, dissolving the distinction between reflection and reality. The individual, Paradise, and the universe become part of the same visual continuum.

Through this cosmic architecture, Machado transforms Borges's philosophical questions into a visual meditation on identity, memory, faith, and existence.

The Iron Coin begins with a literary encounter. Esteban Machado Díaz approaches Jorge Luis Borges's poem not as a text to be illustrated, but as a territory for interpretation.

Ideas of reflection, Paradise, the cosmos, identity, and the invisible move from the written word into Machado's visual language, where they acquire new forms shaped by the artist's own experience, memory, and Latin American roots.

The result is not an illustration of Borges, but a dialogue with him—an encounter between literature and painting in which the poem becomes a point of departure for a new work.

On interpreting Borges through his own visual language, Machado reflects:

“My interpretation comes from my own experience and my roots. That is the richness of art: each person experiences it through their own identity.”

— Esteban Machado Díaz