Los Carpinteros
112.8 x 199.9 cm
An interlocking mosaic of bulbous, lens-like scales ripples across the surface in diagonal drifts, their edges softened into tonal shifts from buff to burnt ochre, forming a pliable yet armored sheath sporadically marked by terse inscriptions—PCC, PAN, MAS, and a 'T' paired with a hammer glyph—integrated as subtle anomalies in the organic grid.
Depicting a portion of an immense serpent's integument, the work embeds acronyms of political movements (Cuba's Partido Comunista, Bolivia's Movimiento al Socialismo, Mexico's Partido Acción Nacional as a dissonant insertion, and the American Communist Party's tool emblem) directly into its defensive fabric, framing ideology as an evolutionary casing—periodically discarded in molts yet always reforming—to probe the adaptive camouflage of leftist coalitions amid neoliberal encroachments and internal fractures.
Los Carpinteros (Marco Castillo and Dagoberto Rodríguez) extend their scrutiny of Cuban objecthood into this series, repurposing the reptile's discardable envelope as a satirical substrate for factional branding, where doctrinal sameness mimics scaly redundancy, exposing the cyclical peeling away of utopian veneers in favor of pragmatic, often predatory realignments across the Americas.