Sofia Carrasco Iglesias: “Serás Otra Vez Montaña”
- 11 hours ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 6 hours ago
The rock spoke back, because we were the rock.
Sofia Carrasco Iglesias likes noses. No one without affection for the schnoz would paint human beings the way she does. The subjects of her artworks bear hefty, fleshy facial loads. Her noses have their own gravity, their own peculiar contours, and their own attention-grabbing bossiness. Some are curved and sculpted like the bulges on a yam, some end in balls like doorknobs, some are great, unmoving snails parked, proprietorially, above tight-lipped mouths. “Retraio Andino,” depicted twice in “Serás Otra Vez Montaña,” Carrasco Iglesias’s solo show at IMUR Gallery (67 Greene St.) wags a nose at us that appears to bend five times as it cascades down his face with the inevitability of a mudslide. His closed eyes, his bent fingers, his ochre cheeks, his upper lip: all of it appears to be spiraling into a capacious left nostril.
It either takes true skill or true love to generate that much drama in a depiction of a face without indulging in caricature. I’m betting it’s love. Carrasco Iglesias’s humans are often distorted, but they never seem bizarre, or warped for the sake of sensation. Instead, they seem carefully formed, molded from raw earth by tectonic processes and the scouring force of history. Exaggerated features and thick limbs and extremities root these characters to stone and soil.
There’s a long tradition of this in Latin American painting (Carrasco Iglesias, who was a Special Project Resident at 14C in 2025 and developed some of this work there, is Peruvian by heritage) and she extends that tradition with elegance, erudition, and good humor. Like Leandro Comrie, the Garden State artist who introduced her at her IMUR opening a week ago, she introduces us to people who are at once archetypical, fanciful, and resolutely ordinary. Like the muralists of Coyoacan and Cuernavaca, she uses fantastic gestures to say something about common struggles, and, in so doing, she ennobles those struggles and gives them a cosmic dimension. Magic realism, you might call it.
Yet there’s a visible difference between the way Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueros (and Leandro Comrie) sees people and the way Sofia Carrasco Iglesias does. Comrie often uses collage in his portraits, but once he’s Frankensteined the pieces together, that’s it: the viewer gets a human subject, rude and material, in totality, and firmly in and of this world. Everything you need to understand that person and his peculiar predicament is on the canvas. Carrasco Iglesias always hints, hard, at the spiritual essence behind the physical form. To look at the works in “Serás Otra Vez Montaña” is to understand the ways in which the body is a costume and the face is a mask. Our sinew and bones are borrowed from the earth, and to the earth they’ll return. Yet there is, the artist seems to believe, something within us that’s trying to get free.
Sometimes this desire is made literal. “La Persona Detrás,” a striking oil painting on a regular-sized piece of paper, is a two-faced thing. In the piece, a pale, moon-faced mask slips from the head of a heavy-featured man. The artificial face, open-mouthed, feminine, rosy-cheeked and a bit astonished, looks heavenward; the thick-browed human subject casts defeated eyes downward. His pie wedge of a nose, his hanging cheeks, his streaming hair, and a chin like the business end of a hammer — all of which appear to be assembled from the same rough-hewn substances that also make up the natural world — point toward the ground. In moss and soil-colored pigments, Carrasco Iglesias is dramatizing a separation of identities, a distillation and dissevering, the abandonment of pretense, a glimpse of the authentic human experience behind the created face we show to our neighbors and ourselves.
From the cloak that rings his shoulders, we guess that the subject of “La Persona Detrás” is Quechua: a native Peruvian. Masks are part of Quechua culture. Through ritual mask-wearers play with human archetypes and poke fun at the devils in our midst. Paradoxically, they also use the mask to find themselves. If we aren’t looking two ways at once, we’re not really looking at all. Sometimes it’s easier to get in touch with cosmic currents during performance than it is when we’re offstage. In “Danza I,” a charcoal drawing on a large canvas and one of two striking mural-like works in “Serás Otra Vez Montaña,” bodies on a low hill reach for the sky and attempt to slough off their skins and reach a higher level of understanding. One man appears to have two mouths. One woman has left earth altogether.
Sofia Carrasco represents motion, and, more importantly, aspiration, by surrounding these bodies with faint outlines of the places in space where limbs once were. She also emphasizes the heavy undersides of breasts, the dark creases in joints, and the black curves of buttocks and upper backs. The spirit is real, but so is the body. Neither one can act independently, or get where its possessor would like to go.
Though they don’t look alike, Carrasco’s “Danza I” reminds me of Frank Big Bear’s electrifying “Ghost Dance of the Great Mystery,” the emotional centerpiece of “Indigenous Identities” at the Zimmerli Museum. “Ghost Dance” is suffused with a longing for escape that anybody can sympathize with, but it’s based on a real thing: the forbidden gatherings of Native Americans that were expressions of resistance to occupation and grief for everything that had been taken away by the European settlers.
“Serás Otra Vez Montaña” is something of a Ghost Dance, too. The title of the show, which translates, roughly, to “you will become a mountain (or mountains) again,” is a line from the Incan ballad “Indio,” a statement of solidarity with native Peruvians associated with the Lima songwriter Alicia Maguiña. Sofia Carrasco Iglesias is a musician and composer — she blew her saxophone beautifully at the show opening — and her association of the themes of her show with Maguiña’s song is deliberate. In one stunner of an ink drawing, Carrasco Iglesias takes Maguiña at her word, drawing a mound of entangled bodies, arched spines, oversized feet, gasping faces, piled up, smoothed over, and made sessile. They are not dead. They're not even particularly sad. They’ve joined together and become one with the rock.
The song continues on the top floor with the mural-like oil on paper “Ñakary,” another piece named after a Peruvian idiom for suffering. “Danza I” is the moonlit fantasy of soaring beyond our earthly bounds; “Ñakary” is the daytime reality of loss and the strong, tough tether to the land and to each other. Nine human figures, each one with the warmth and solidity of a piece of fast-thrown pottery, close their eyes in grief, or hang their heads, or tip back their chins and howl. They’re in close proximity to each other, and the body heat is palpable, but their distress is too overwhelming for them to take any comfort in their togetherness.
Each of these penitents at the shrine of loss is engaged in an individual act of mourning, yet they’re clearly united by their collective experience. They’re also clearly indigenous. Cleverly, Sofia Carrasco Iglesias has arranged their hunched bodies and stacked heads so they form a low pyramid. They’re becoming a mountain. Maybe they already are one.
(It’s August, and the gallery schedule is slowing down. That’s a shame for Carrasco Iglesias, because her outstanding show deserves more attention that this article.You’ve got two chances to see it: Saturday, August 22 and Saturday August 29 from 2 p.m. until 6 p.m. I think you should do it.)
