The distance from San Juan, Puerto Rico to El Barrio in Harlem is approximately 1,610 miles. By plane, it’s four hours—give or take tail winds—plus traffic and the TSA line. By boat, a few days with stops along the way. FaceTime and phone calls seemingly shrink the space from here to there, but the expanse swiftly returns. Since 2003, the Puerto Rican-born artist Tony Cruz Pabón has meditated on the true immensity of distance, using graphite pencil to attempt to draw a line the physical length from his San Juan hometown to places elsewhere on the map.

It is an exercise rooted in failure. Each iteration of Cruz Pabón’s Distance Drawings is newly created in situ at galleries and museums around the world, from Berlin to Brazil to his latest attempt in El Museo del Barrio here in New York City. The works are always limited by the time and space allotted by the galleries, as well as the physical demands of the body. Working only with a pencil and a piece of wood that serves as both straightedge and measuring device, Cruz Pabón painstakingly charts these abstract representations of distance and time directly onto the gallery wall, drawing line after line while the other works of the exhibition are mounted around him.

The version in El Museo covers the length of one wall in tightly spaced horizontal lines that wiggle slightly over the natural bumps and texture of the gallery-white paint beneath. The spacing between the thin lines is imperfect, creating patterns of light and dark, a gradient representation of the dark and light aspects of journey, travel, and diasporic experience. Like the final squished-together letters on top of an amateur birthday cake, the lines start to lean and tilt in increasingly more dramatic increments until they reach the opposite wall and cause the artist to run out of space, tiny early errors magnified. Though he worked consistently from morning to night for nearly three weeks prior to the show opening, he was ultimately only able to complete about 5.2 miles of lines, a distance that amounts to a mere .32% of the journey.