(Horse)

(Horse) evinces Carballo’s interest in depicting the masses and striations of muscle in both human and animal bodies, its slabs of living flesh at once formless and painfully strained. The isolation of the horse’s head from its body—no less, its physical distortion—amplifies sensations of pain and isolation. Carballo insists here on the visceral materiality of the animal, one whose existential, anguished bearing recalls historical traumas of war and conquest and, at a prior moment, of the horse’s domestication and integration into human life.