The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Lima (MAC Lima) is set to launch its 2025 exhibition cycle on March 14 with two compelling solo shows: “Conversations in the Zoo” by Moico Yaker and “Mirrors of a Lost Humanity” by Rafael Pascuale. Both exhibitions promise to engage audiences through distinct yet resonant explorations of baroque aesthetics, the human condition, and the complex relationship between humanity and the natural world.
Moico Yaker, a celebrated Peruvian artist known for his baroque sensibilities and commitment to unsettling equilibrium in painting, returns to the exhibition scene with “Conversations in the Zoo.” This exhibition features approximately 70 works, encompassing large, medium, and small-format paintings. The title references the 17th and 18th-century European portrait genre known as “conversation pieces,” but Yaker subverts this tradition by replacing human figures with animals in domestic settings, creating a peculiar equivalence.
Yaker also draws inspiration from the historic zoo in the Barranco district, where MAC Lima is located. His earlier exhibitions in the 1980s offered a contemporary alternative by incorporating fragments of landscape, narrative, and portraiture. The 1990s saw the consolidation of this visual language through recognizable citations, history, and icons. A recurring theme is the tension between the human and non-human, represented through a rich depiction of flora and fauna.
Curator Augusto Del Valle notes that the 2020 pandemic, with its temporary retreat of human presence, profoundly influenced Yaker’s work. The sudden appearance of wildlife in urban spaces—elephants, cats, camels, ducks, monkeys, herons, giraffes, lions, tigers—became a central motif. These paintings emphasize the distinct and the multiple, depicting scenes where fish surround animals and swarms of small entities disperse around a vortex. The non-human, or the “Other,” is activated, creating choreographies between entities that invite open and cross-interpretations. These lines of flight challenge the imagination, presenting a vision that, while persistently utopian, is now tinged with intrigue and uncertainty.
In contrast, Rafael Pascuale’s “Mirrors of a Lost Humanity” offers a baroque reimagining of the human body, presenting new and disturbing visual and theoretical propositions. Pascuale draws upon the canonical iconographic compositions of José de Ribera, Guido Reni, and Pedro Pablo Rubens to intervene in the traditional European imaginary associated with Greco-Roman mythology, the Sacred Scriptures, and Catholic hagiography. His large-format paintings, exhibited here for the first time, literally re-present scenes such as the Three Graces, the Martyrdom and Crucifixion of Saint Peter, the Flaying of Saint Bartholomew, and the Massacre of the Holy Innocents.
Pascuale transgresses religious art to re-semanticize it. His characters have multiple extremities—heads, hands, legs, torsos, abdomens—suggesting that they are living beings in motion within the painting. However, none of them have a face, indicating that they are no longer identifiable historical or mythical figures from European baroque art. In his paintings, the Divine Word—the God made human—has disappeared forever, liquefied into a mass of anonymous and unredeemable collective bodies, without voice or identity.
Curator Ramón Mujica Pinilla describes Pascuale’s work as a potent visual metaphor that personifies the modern dehumanization of society and war. “The Massacre of the Innocents,” Pascuale’s masterpiece, is a contemporary baroque hieroglyph that encodes the total devaluation of the human body in our time, reflected in the immense pile of innocent men, women, children, and the elderly, heaped upon each other, massacred, agonizing, or inert. Herodes embodies the tyrannical ruler who exercises absolute power, oppressing the faceless bodies of dehumanized victims. The biblical scene recalls the dramatic current war situation in the Middle East. Pascuale’s painting, with its deep black backgrounds in non-existent spaces, serves as the mental mirror of our lost humanity, in the raw.
Together, “Conversations in the Zoo” and “Mirrors of a Lost Humanity” offer a compelling dialogue on the state of humanity and its relationship with both the natural and the societal. Yaker’s vibrant and dynamic animal portraits invite viewers to reconsider their connection to the non-human world, while Pascuale’s haunting and distorted figures serve as a stark reminder of the dehumanizing forces at play in contemporary society. As MAC Lima opens its doors to these exhibitions, audiences are invited to reflect on the bridges and divides that characterize our shared existence, and to contemplate the future of humanity in an increasingly complex and uncertain world.
This detailed article synthesizes the key themes and curatorial insights from both exhibitions, providing a comprehensive overview for potential visitors.
Photo credits: The photographs are the property of the museum. First row of the photos: Moico Yaker and his works. Second row: Rafael and Moico and Moico’s works.