“masks”
“Masks”, a series of works that explores themes of identity, memory, migration, and cultural continuity through a series of paintings. The works engage both archival research and community collaboration to interrogate how narratives of cultural ancestry and identity are constructed, preserved, and reimagined.
Dan Monteavaro’s paintings begin at the edge of
disappearance. Nature as the inevitable force, patient and total, reclaiming everything civilization believes it owns. The figures at the center are caught mid-dissolution: human faces merging with ancestral masks, animal heads, sacred forms. What we inherit and what we leave behind, held briefly in the same body.
Sebald wrote that we walk through the world carrying everyone who came before us, and that the world will swallow us the same way it swallowed them. Koren wrote that the most honest beauty is found in what is incomplete, impermanent, in the process of returning. Monteavaro paints that moment, the one just before the vines close in. Ancestral knowledge as something alive inside us, passing through.
“Masks” takes on different meanings relative to geography, context, and culture. The works directly references specific masks or their functions (for instance Yoruba and Pende masks reference the infusion of African religions into the carribbean and still within the current and ancestral culture) they also encourage viewers to confront their own judgments as they attempt to classify the
subjects in the paintings. the works reflect the fragmented aspects of being latino, multicultural and human, the different parts of the self revealed to the world, or sometimes hidden from plain view.
The everyday scenes where we don’t know the cultural history that everyone carries and connects us all in fundamental ways, much more than we often realize or notice.
Dan Monteavaro’s paintings begin at the edge of
disappearance. Nature as the inevitable force, patient and total, reclaiming everything civilization believes it owns. The figures at the center are caught mid-dissolution: human faces merging with ancestral masks, animal heads, sacred forms. What we inherit and what we leave behind, held briefly in the same body.
Sebald wrote that we walk through the world carrying everyone who came before us, and that the world will swallow us the same way it swallowed them. Koren wrote that the most honest beauty is found in what is incomplete, impermanent, in the process of returning. Monteavaro paints that moment, the one just before the vines close in. Ancestral knowledge as something alive inside us, passing through.
“Masks” takes on different meanings relative to geography, context, and culture. The works directly references specific masks or their functions (for instance Yoruba and Pende masks reference the infusion of African religions into the carribbean and still within the current and ancestral culture) they also encourage viewers to confront their own judgments as they attempt to classify the
subjects in the paintings. the works reflect the fragmented aspects of being latino, multicultural and human, the different parts of the self revealed to the world, or sometimes hidden from plain view.
The everyday scenes where we don’t know the cultural history that everyone carries and connects us all in fundamental ways, much more than we often realize or notice.
Caesin and Acrylic on canvas
2026
Caesin and Acrylic on canvas
2026
Caesin and Acrylic on canvas
2026
Caesin and Acrylic on canvas
2026
Caesin and Acrylic on canvas
2026
Caesin and Acrylic on canvas
2026
Caesin and Acrylic on canvas
2026
Caesin and Acrylic on canvas
2026
Caesin and Acrylic on canvas
2026