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The crowding is total. The surface offers neither air nor background, but rather a wall of countenances competing for the foreground in suffocating compression. In this 1975 print, the boundary between the living face and the ritual mask dissolves completely; human features, grooved by mustaches and sidelong glances, share the same carved rigidity as the totemic effigies that watch over or supplant them. The gouge bites into the wood with a raw edge that makes no distinction between skin, polished wood, or bone.

The tension is articulated through the contrast between the graphic stillness of the blacks and the modulation of the intermediate inks. A rust red and an ashen violet tint the flat areas, revealing the grain of the matrix and endowing the figures with an organic vibration that contrasts with the coldness of the incised cut. Amid this earthy saturation, the sparse flashes of pure white operate as points of maximum optical alarm: the bared teeth of a contorted visage in the upper left corner, the unyielding eyes challenging the viewer, and a pair of pale, diminutive hands emerging between the bodies, as if begging for help or witnessing a silent confinement.

In this confluence of gazes lies a psychological multiplicity that avoids individual portraiture. Each head looks in a different direction, locked in its own anxiety, yet joined to the others by the sharp, vertical rhythm of the gouged incisions. By placing sharp-featured masks alongside mestizo faces with pronounced features, the scene suggests a spectral coexistence where the ancestral and the everyday incessantly overlap. The mask does not conceal the wearer's identity; instead, it seems to uncover an intimate, collective, and stark dimension that the ordinary face attempts to restrain.