Carlos Amorales – Face and Mask

Face and Mask
Carlos Amorales

Jeroen Kooijmans, Azzurra de Gregorio, Chiara Zenzani, Rowena Morales, Víctor del Oral, Astrid Svangren, Erik Tlaseca, Isaac Olvera

Opening: October 27, 2025 7pm
Duration: October 28 – December 6, 2025

Opening hours: Tue – Fri 12 – 6pm, Sat 11 am – 2pm

 
Carlos Amorales turns the mask into a mirror of our time. It is not merely an ornament or disguise, but a territory where identity, myth, and power intersect. This new exhibition reveals how what the mask conceals ends up showing with greater force: the fragility of the human in the face of technology, the tension between the local and the global, between the intimate and the collective. Far from conceiving the face or the mask as an aesthetic or ritual accessory, the artist places them at the center of a reflection that questions identity, representation, and the politics of the image in the digital age.

Since ancient times, the mask has served as a mediator between the self and the other, between the human and the divine, between the visible and the hidden. Amorales takes up this symbolic device and inserts it into a field of current tensions, where the face and mask become a space of social recognition and subjectivity confronted with media saturation, technological control, and the precariousness of cultural narratives in globalization.

The dialogue established with the iconic figure of El Santo, the Silver-Masked Man, is fundamental. By recovering this symbol of Mexican identity, Carlos not only refers to a popular icon, but also exposes the fragility of collective identities in the face of global discourse. The wrestling mask, which in its original context protects while simultaneously constructing a myth, here becomes a metaphor for a lost search for identity, an attempt to cling to cultural signs in the face of homogenization.