In Encrypted Messages, Darío Escobar transforms bullet-riddled signs – collected across Guatemala and southern Mexico—into meditations on violence, memory, and symbolic language. Gilded with gold leaf on one side and left raw on the other, the works oscillate between devotional object and urban relic, echoing the spiritual and material duality found in the work of artist Mathias Goeritz. Escobar overlays the remnants of localized aggression with a formal language drawn from Baroque aesthetics and modernist abstraction – offering a simultaneous reading of damage as message, and material as metaphor.

The bullet holes become a kind of encrypted text: readable not through language, but through affect, intuition, and context. In combining beauty with trauma, Escobar creates a conceptual tension between surface and depth, gesture and intent. Encrypted Messages continues his broader exploration of postcolonial identity, where materials function as historical witnesses—and the language of form becomes a space for reflection, resistance, and ritual.