For Mulet, one of the most compelling ideas in Borges’s poem is the presence of waiting.

Evening falls, light changes, and yet something remains unresolved. Time continues to pass, but the landscape seems suspended between what has already occurred and what is still to come.

This sense of waiting transforms the passage of time into an experience of anticipation. The landscape does not simply record the falling of evening; it appears to inhabit the interval between one moment and the next.

In Borges’s The Hourglass, time is evoked through images of water, sunlight, evening, and the instruments through which human beings attempt to measure its passage.

Mulet encounters these ideas through the language of landscape. Rather than translating the poem literally into painting, she allows time to emerge through atmosphere, changing light, water, structures, and the sensation of waiting.

What Borges explores through poetry becomes, in Mulet’s work, a visual experience: a landscape in transition, suspended between light and shadow, presence and disappearance, one moment and the next.

The result is not an illustration of the poem, but a meeting between two languages in which time becomes both subject and landscape.

Reflecting on The Hourglass and her encounter with Jorge Luis Borges’s poem, Ileana Mulet explains:

“Night falls, but beyond that, there is still a sense of waiting. That is what I found most compelling in the poem.”

— Ileana Mulet