CSB Fine Arts | Contemporary Art Gallery

Carlos Ayala deconstructs the human figure into symbolic fragments - eyes, faces, and objects - reassembling them into psychologically charged compositions. Whether working on canvas or silicone, his approach remains consistent: the surface is a proxy for skin, where identity is not fixed but continuously reconstructed through image and perception.

Some of the works presented here are tattoo on silicone, a material Ayala uses to push that idea further, treating it as a literal stand-in for the human body.

Rather than seeking to restore the figure into a unified whole, his work embraces fragmentation as a condition of contemporary experience. Faces emerge and dissolve, symbols repeat and shift, and the body becomes a site of memory, projection, and transformation.  

The small bear is a character Ayala created to represent himself as a child, and the accident that damaged his left eye. It became the way he carried something that happened before he had words for it. The dinosaur, which appears across many works, comes from mythology, where it represents the ego, the voice that never stops speaking. The skulls are his way of confronting something most people avoid. Ayala believes people move through life as if they will be here forever. The skulls are a reminder that they will not. 

His practice collapses the boundaries between tattoo culture and contemporary art, transforming the language of permanent marking into a meditation on perception, identity, and the instability of self-image.