Through drawing, painting, photography, and sculpture, La máscara asumida explores ideas of appearance, skin, and the body as sites of becoming and transformation, through a selection of works by Mara Corsino, Culeybo, Juanita Lanzo, Jomar Rodríguez, and La Trinchera. The show takes up the genre of portraiture to consider appearance as a series of transformations that depend on the mediated relationship between observer and observed. This relationship informs our worldview, where the face marks someone as a pop cultural celebrity worthy of adoration or mythologically as a dangerous and seductive being, a different type of celebrity. La máscara asumida resamples previously unexhibited works, as well as works from past exhibitions, to renew our fascination with the genre of portraiture and with appearance as a mask to be assumed.

Mara Corsino's Gold Bunny series explores the intersection between her career as a professional portrait photographer and her personal creative practice. In 2020, Corsino photographed Bad Bunny for the cover of The New York Times Magazine, before the release of his hit album YHLQMDLG. In Gold Bunny, Corsino layers red and gold enamel over the magazine cover, simultaneously highlighting and obscuring Benito's portrait while drawing our attention to his features. By abstracting his overall appearance, this gesture serves to navigate the social structures that shape how we view ourselves and others.

Culeybo's Inner Beauty series delves into the malleability of appearance through deftly constructed works that invite interaction. Using synthetic fabrics that he sews together to create malleable textile skins that conceal a flayed interior portrait, Culeybo's fabric-and-oil-on-panel paintings address concerns about appearance, aging, and gender. As time passes and the works are interacted with, the outer textile skin develops sags or tightens up, as well as showing wear marks, a clever way of marking time and their relative age.

In Juanita Lanzo's drawings and collages, successive layers of watercolor and strokes combine to create biomorphic forms that actively interact with the composition. Alluding to biological cycles—cells, entrails, organs, and tissues—Lanzo's works on paper evoke organic metabolism and the constant state of becoming something else. In her images, the ambiguity and intertwining of her marks hint at the crisscrossing of lateral and overlapping relationships with other people, creatures, and things: an expressive space between living bodies.

Untitled, by Jomar Rodríguez, is a ceramic sculptural lamp of a humanoid holding up an unhappy mask. The protruding flaccid nipples and the spiky, glossy black gloves give the work a strange eeriness to it, relating to latex as a "second skin" that acts as a fetishistic surrogate for the wearer's own skin. The mask's expression, that of a sad emoji, triggers some confusion within the work, in understanding seeming to arise with the expression; even in real life, one person's joyful smile is another person's sarcastic smirk.

La Trinchera's scenic photo performance reprises and adapts CRUDAS as a narrative that loosely approximates the seduction of sirens and mermaids, which, initially in classical antiquity, were depicted as hybrid beings with the face or torso of a woman and the body of a bird who lived on rocky islands; from the Middle Ages onward, they took on a fish-like appearance: beautiful women with fish tails instead of legs who dwelled in the depths. CRUDAS is a theatre-dance manifesto conceived as a malleable score to be exercised and adapted to different sites. Each montage has a flexible duration depending on the conditions and context of the space-event. For this montage, La Trinchera rebuffs the conventional notion of photographic documentation in performance as a record of an event witnessed by an audience, approaching the still image as a microcosm of a larger, scenic, and narrative aesthetic.