“El Grito” (The Scream) by Luis Moscoso: The echo of our primitive anguish
By Silvio Moscoso
Some works seek to be understood, others demand to be felt. 'El Grito' (The Scream), Luis Moscoso's latest series, is neither an aesthetic exercise nor a visual indulgence: it is a visceral blow, a tear in the fabric of existence. With relentless rawness, Moscoso hurls us into the abyss of the human, where anguish, desperation, and psychosis merge into a pictorial language that confronts us with the unavoidable: our own stifled scream.
Composed of nine mixed-media pieces, 'El Grito' (The Sream) not only depicts the act of screaming, but embodies it. The shattered mouths, the dentition on the verge of fragmentation, the lips torn by the very need to expel the internal storm, confront us with the violence of the being that finds no escape. The ochre, brown, and purple hues are not mere chromatic choices, but a reflection of the earthy, the putrid, the dense. There is a seismic charge in these paintings that refers to the transient madness of despair, a state in which the body is no longer the vessel of the soul, but its executioner.
The horror in 'El Grito' is not that of the fantastic or the supernatural. It is the horror of the quotidian, of the internal, of the endless struggle between identity and oblivion. Moscoso, with the precision of a surgeon of the soul, extracts the deepest wound of the human condition: the fear of being swallowed by our own existence. He reminds us that the scream is not only an act of desperation, but also a demand to be heard, a mute plea that, paradoxically, we can only hear in our own echo.
This series does not pretend to be comfortable, nor even communicative in traditional terms. It does not seek to narrate, but to make one feel. Like in the most terrifying visions of Francis Bacon, in the psychic rawness of Edvard Munch, or in the social anguish of Oswaldo Guayasamín, Moscoso does not paint people, but states of the soul. And it is there that his genius manifests itself: in his ability to tear off the skin of form and show us what lies beneath, without filters or consolations. The visual mutilation we see in these open mouths is, in reality, the mutilation of identity in a world that pushes us into silence.
But 'El Grito' (The Scream) is not just despair. In its anguish, there is also resistance. In the tear, there is an act of affirmation: the need to persist, to tear one's throat if necessary, but never to disappear. And therein lies the greatness of this series. Because when we stand before it in silence, when we let its images pierce us, we realize something terrifying: that scream is not alien. It is ours. And perhaps we have gone years without hearing it.
