Pepe Espaliú: The Mask, the Object, the Wound

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Before the famous image of Carrying, Pepe Espaliú had already built a language of masks, objects and wounds.

Pepe Espaliú is too often remembered from the end.

A body carried through Madrid. Bare feet that do not touch the ground. Arms that receive him, hold him, pass him on. A public action so powerful that it has almost become the whole story.

But Carrying was not the beginning of Pepe Espaliú’s art. It was the moment when a language already built in silence became impossible to keep private. Long before that image entered Spanish cultural memory, Espaliú had been working through masks, gloves, cages, saints, bells, litters, wounds and absent bodies.

His real subject was not illness alone, and not even identity in the usual sense. It was the unstable form through which a body becomes visible without ever becoming fully available.

Pepe Espaliú before the final image

José “Pepe” González Espaliú was born in Córdoba in 1955. He came from a family connected to jewelry and goldsmithing, and that background seems to remain in the work as a sensitivity to small forms, charged surfaces and objects that concentrate meaning rather than display it.

In 1974 he moved to Barcelona, where he studied Philosophy and attended classes at the Escola Massana. That double formation matters. Espaliú was never only a maker of images. He was an artist who thought through signs, materials and symbolic pressure.

Later, in Paris, he encountered a wider intellectual and artistic world: Figuration Libre, psychoanalysis, semiotics, Lacan, Barthes. These references are useful only if they help us see the work more clearly. Pepe Espaliú was not illustrating theory. He was learning that the self is never transparent, and that the image often hides as much as it reveals.Pepe Espaliú: The Mask, the Object, the Wound

The face is not a confession

In the mid-1980s, Espaliú’s paintings often returned to faces, heads, eyes, thorns, syringes and dark symbolic fields. Works such as Para asesinar una risa, La lealtad del verdugo and The Visionary Discipline belong to this dense and uncomfortable phase.

The face, in these works, is not a place of clarity. It is a surface under threat. It can be read, punished, desired, masked, injured. Nothing in these paintings behaves like confession. Pepe Espaliú gives us signs, not explanations.

That is why reading him only through biography is too easy. The work is personal, but it is not a diary. It does not say: here is my wound. It asks what kind of world makes a wound necessary before a body can be understood.

Against the easy label of expressionism

Espaliú’s paintings can be placed near the darker energies of European neo-expressionism. The comparison is not wrong, but it does not go far enough.

His images are not powerful because they explode. They are powerful because they hold something back. Pain does not become spectacle. Desire does not become liberation. The body does not step forward whole and available.

The tension in these works comes from obstruction. The image seems to speak through a blocked mouth. It shows, but only partially. It opens, then withdraws. This rhythm will remain central when Pepe Espaliú moves from painting to objects.

Pepe Espaliú and the turn to objects

Around 1988, after moving to Madrid, Espaliú moved away from painting and turned more decisively toward drawing, sculpture, collage and mixed-media objects. This was not only a technical shift. The work changed its temperature.

Painting had allowed him to create symbolic atmospheres. Objects gave those symbols a body.

A glove could suggest touch without giving us skin. A cage could mean protection and punishment at the same time. A bell without a clapper could make silence physical. A mask could appear as a face, but also as the proof that the face could not safely appear.

From this moment, the body in Pepe Espaliú does not disappear. It becomes displaced.

Pepe Espaliú’s Máscaras: the truth forced to hide

The Máscaras series is one of the strongest entrances into Espaliú’s art. A mask is never neutral. It protects, but it also exposes the need for protection. It allows an appearance, but only by changing the terms of appearance.

The MACBA’s work page for S.T. Sèrie: “Máscara” is useful here because it shows how, between the late 1980s and early 1990s, Espaliú repeatedly returned to the face, the mask, the oval and the shell as forms of identity rather than simple motifs.

In a weaker reading, the mask simply means concealment. In Espaliú, it is sharper than that. The mask is a survival form.

For a queer artist formed in a Spain still carrying the residues of dictatorship, Catholic discipline and private shame, the mask is not theatre. It is daily architecture. It belongs to the body that knows visibility is not automatically freedom.

Pepe Espaliú does not treat the mask as a lie. He treats it as one of the forms truth is forced to take.

Santos: sacred forms, impure bodies

The Santos series opens another crucial line in his work. These are not saints in the obedient sense. They are strange, small, almost relic-like objects, often closer to damaged devotion than to religious certainty.

Espaliú takes the language of sanctity and makes it unstable. The sacred becomes intimate, tactile, contaminated. It no longer belongs only to purity, sacrifice or official belief. It begins to touch desire, secrecy, injury and marginality.

This is one of the most interesting parts of his work. He does not simply reject Catholic imagery from outside. He enters it, bends it, dirties it, makes it answer to bodies that religious morality had often excluded.

The object as a substitute body

Pepe Espaliú’s objects often feel like bodies without anatomy.

A glove is a hand and not a hand. A shell is shelter and withdrawal. A cage is a body’s outline turned into a prison. A litter is a structure waiting for weight. A silent bell is speech that cannot arrive.

These objects are not decorative symbols. They behave like substitutes. They stand where the body cannot yet stand. They make absence active.

This is why his sculpture feels performative even when nobody moves. The object seems to wait for an action: to be worn, entered, carried, touched, avoided. The performance is already inside the thing.

Identity as an incomplete appearance

Espaliú belongs inside the history of LGBTQ+ art from classical to contemporary forms, but not because he simply represents queer identity. His work is more difficult and more useful than that.

He shows what comes before declaration: coding, disguise, partial appearance, self-protection, erotic tension, shame, danger. Visibility is not presented as a clean victory. It is unstable. It can save, but it can also expose. It can recognize, but it can also consume.

This makes Pepe Espaliú feel contemporary in a way that has little to do with dates. Today, too, identity is often demanded as a public performance before any real protection exists around it.

Reading Pepe Espaliú’s Carrying from the earlier work

Carrying should be read from the masks, cages, gloves, bells and litters, not the other way around.

If we begin from the final public image, everything before it becomes preparation for a biography. If we begin from the objects, the performance becomes something richer: the moment when the hidden body enters the structure that had been waiting for it.

The Carrying sculptures of the early 1990s are essential here. They resemble litters or palanquins, supports built for a vulnerable body. Even when empty, they are not inert. They ask who is missing, who must be carried, and what kind of relation is created by the act of support.

The Museo Reina Sofía collection entry for Carrying XI makes this especially clear: before the public action became an image, Carrying already existed as a sculptural structure, an empty support waiting for a body.

The public action did not replace the sculptures. It activated their question.

The diagnosis was not the origin

Pepe Espaliú was diagnosed HIV-positive in 1990 while in New York. The diagnosis changed the urgency of his work and led to a more public engagement with illness, stigma and social care. It would be false to minimize that.

But it would be just as false to make it the origin of his art.

AIDS did not invent Espaliú’s vocabulary. It intensified it. Masks, wounds, silence, body substitutes, fragile supports, ritual, disappearance: these were already there. Illness made them harder to keep coded.

This is also why the Reina Sofía’s retrospective framing of Espaliú, with its emphasis on suffering, pleasure, the mask, isolation and the wound, is more useful than a purely biographical reading of the late works.

This is the better way to understand the late works. They are not a rupture from the earlier practice. They are the earlier practice under extreme pressure.

Pepe Espaliú’s El nido: no easy transcendence

In 1993, Espaliú created El nido at Sonsbeek in Arnhem. Compared with Carrying, it feels solitary, vertical, almost mystical.

The documentation of El nido preserved by the MACBA Foundation helps keep this final action away from easy mythology: the work is not a peaceful farewell, but a repeated, physical act of shedding, circling and exposure.

The artist climbs, spins, sheds clothing, leaves traces below. References to whirling dervishes and spiritual movement matter, but the work should not be turned into a soft farewell.

There is no clean escape here. The body does not simply transcend itself. It performs the difficulty of leaving. The nest is not paradise. It is a fragile construction made from what the body removes.

Why Pepe Espaliú matters now

Pepe Espaliú matters because he understood something that many cleaner accounts of identity still miss: a body rarely becomes visible all at once.

First it may appear as a mask. Then as a wound. Then as an object, a silence, a ritual, a substitute, a form that carries what cannot yet be said directly.

His work is not important only because it reached a public and political intensity in the final years. It is important because the whole practice shows how fragility becomes form before it becomes an image.

That is also why museums should be careful with him. A single photograph of Carrying can carry the story too easily. The harder Espaliú is in the objects, the strange saints, the mute bells, the masks that do not confess, the empty structures that seem to wait.

After the mask

Pepe Espaliú died in Córdoba in 1993, at thirty-eight. His death belongs to the story, but it should not be allowed to close the work.

The real force of Espaliú is not that he made a vulnerable body visible at the end. It is that, for years, he built a language for the conditions under which a body becomes difficult to show.

That language remains alive because it does not give itself away. It withholds. It wounds. It protects. It lets the object speak before the body arrives.

Before the public action, the mask had already spoken.

Before the body was carried, the object had already been waiting.

Before Pepe Espaliú became an icon, he had already built the wound into form.

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