Oscar Carvallo is deeply fascinated by the Fayoum portraits created during the Roman Empire. Through them, he explores the history of humanity, the mysterious encounter of cultures that, in the first centuries of our era, sought to preserve something beyond the body: an immortal presence.

The timeless intensity of these ancient faces becomes a point of departure for his own work. Carvallo is particularly drawn to the depth of the skin, the stillness of the expressions, and above all, the hypnotic power of the eyes—eyes that seem to carry memories, desires, fears, and fragments of lives that have survived time.

His fascination with Surrealism adds another dimension to this research. For Carvallo, the portrait is not only a representation of a face, but also a territory of the unconscious. He imagines the artist’s mind as a place where memory, history, dreams, symbols, and inherited emotions coexist. The unconscious becomes a bridge between past and present, allowing ancient imagery to reappear through a contemporary and poetic language.

By revisiting the spirit of the Fayoum painters through a contemporary surrealist vision, Oscar Carvallo creates a dialogue between archaeology and imagination, reality and dream, memory and desire.

His work invites the viewer to travel through time and to confront some of humanity’s most enduring questions: the meaning of beauty, love, life, death, identity, spirituality, and the mysterious possibility of the divine.