Artists

Carlos Vega is a painter and mixed-media artist whose work draws on history, mythology, and religion to explore questions of humanity, spirituality, and cultural coexistence. Often working on canvas or lead, Vega integrates historical documents—such as antique ledgers, library catalog cards, stamps, newspapers, and labels—into his surfaces, which he punctures, etches, and paints over. These layers of text and imagery evoke memory, storytelling, and the persistence of history within the present.

Recurring motifs in Vega’s practice include allegorical symbols such as trees, celestial bodies, and animals, particularly elephants and donkeys. His imagery references both the personal—such as the latticed screens of his native Melilla—and the universal, including inspiration from moments in history when Christianity, Judaism, and Islam coexisted peacefully. Celestial imagery, sourced from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, suggests distant worlds that serve as mirrors for our own.

In recent series, Vega has created contemporary icons of heroines, saints, and goddesses from across cultures—figures like the Chinese goddess Nüwa and activist Malala Yousafzai—rendered with rhythmic, linear gesso marks against luminous color fields. These works echo the chants and mantras of global religious traditions, emphasizing continuity between past and present while reimagining spiritual archetypes for today’s world.