Curator Cuauhtémoc Medina
Thursday 19 November 2026
Talk between artist & curator: 17hr
Opening: 19hr
19 November 2026 – 6 February 2027
proyectoamil
Lima
On November 19, 2026, proyectoamil will present The Way of the Mask, the first Lima exhibition by Mexican artist Carlos Amorales, curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina.
Carlos Amorales’s practice constantly explores the relationships between image, language, identity, and culture. His work moves between the playful and the unsettling, between mass culture and conceptual experimentation, questioning how we produce, recognize, and inhabit our own images.
Ideas and images often leap in spirals. Rather than returning, they project themselves onto unfamiliar planes. In the mid-1990s, Carlos Amorales found in the mask a device for an ironic interrogation of identity. By reproducing his own appearances as lucha libre masks and using them as a strategic double, he triggered an unexpected short circuit between mass culture and conceptual art.
Three decades later, the mask and the fabrication of persona have once again emerged as a focus in many of Amorales’s works from the 2020s. The COVID crisis, the widespread adoption of avatars and social media personas, the immediate availability of mirrors for the remote transmission of the ego, the global threat of fascism, and the way culture has, with little reflection, embraced the celebration and/or policing of identities—all of this has led the artist to wage a battle against the proliferation of cybernetically enhanced faces.
The works in this exhibition reveal the breadth of skills and resources of an artist capable of constant reinvention. They range from expressive drawing to video that subverts the conventions of the zoom, to costume fabrication, and to a critique of ideological form that is at once playful, iconoclastic, and essayistic—a critique of the invention of personae in both post-liberal societies and digital media. These works constitute a range of elaborations at a time when simulation is becoming increasingly masked.
