THE LANGUAGE OF LAYERS: TOMÁS CARRANZA AND TIME
Life is not made of straight lines, but of layers and overlapping planes—like painting, like memory, like time. Tomás Carranza embraces this understanding in his most recent artistic exploration, Textures in Time. The exhibition will be open until October 31st at The Americas Collection, and not only continues the reflections of his 2023 show The Threads of Time but also expands his visual language into a symphony of materials, memories, and emotions.
Carranza’s work has always been attentive to the intangible weight of memory. In Textures in Time, this attention evolves into a more tactile vocabulary. Canvas, thread, pigments, and fragments of found material interweave to suggest that time itself is a woven surface, fragile yet resilient. Just as memories do not appear as singular events but as layers of sensations, colors, and textures, Carranza constructs images that refuse simplicity. Instead, they invite viewers to dwell within complexity, to notice what lies beneath and between.
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Tomás Caranza: Textures in Time. Courtesy The Americas Collection
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Tomás Caranza: Textures in Time. Courtesy The Americas Collection
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Tomás Caranza: Textures in Time. Courtesy The Americas Collection
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Tomás Caranza. Vuelo Eterno, 2025. Gold Leaf | Mixed Media on Canvas. Courtesy The Americas Collection
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Tomás Caranza. Juegos de Luz, 2024. Mixed media with gold leaf on canvas, 41 x 80 inches 104 x 203 cm. Courtesy The Americas Collection
The exhibition also marks a shift toward more material experimentation. Whereas The Threads of Time focused primarily on linearity and the symbolic presence of thread;Textures in Time opens to broader planes of abstraction. The works resemble palimpsests: surfaces that have been written, erased, and rewritten, much like human memory itself. Through overlapping textures, Carranza reflects on how experiences are not static but constantly revised—by remembering, forgetting, and reinterpreting.
For Carranza, the act of layering is both a technical and philosophical gesture. It resists the illusion of neat narratives, acknowledging instead that our lives are patchworks of influences, places, and histories. As an artist from El Salvador, a country marked by migration and memory, Carranza situates his practice within a broader cultural dialogue about resilience and identity. His art suggests that memory, like painting, is never finished—it is always in process, a surface awaiting its next layer.
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Tomás Caranza. Courtesy The Americas Collection
Textures in Time is ultimately an invitation to slow down and look carefully. Its works cannot be consumed in a glance; they ask for attention, for patience, for presence. By tracing the textures of his materials, Carranza encourages us to reflect on the textures of our own time—those uneven, layered, and beautiful surfaces that shape what it means to live and to remember.
Textures in Time will be on display until October 31, 2025, at The Americas Collection, 4213 Ponce de Leon Blvd, Coral Gables, FL, 33146, (United States).
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