Constellations of Scars: Gabriel Núñez del Prado’s Cristóbal Illuminated at the Peruvian Embassy in London
- PARLIAMENT NEWS
- Oct 3
- 4 min read
Updated: Oct 6
London thrives on evenings such as this: where diplomacy, art, and literature converge beneath the gilt chandeliers of embassies, and where the city, for a fleeting moment, holds its breath in reverence. On the 2nd of October 2025, the Embassy of Peru London became the crucible for such an encounter. At the gracious invitation of His Excellency Ignacio Higueras Hare,
Ambassador of Peru to the United Kingdom, guests assembled to witness the unveiling of an extraordinary exhibition of artworks inspired by Cristóbal, the audacious and labyrinthine novel of Peruvian writer Gabriel Núñez del Prado.
Before the official opening of the exhibition, Gabriel sat in thoughtful conversation with Doctor of Humanities Fátima Poppe Mujica — a meeting that felt less like an interview and more like a dialogue between two luminous minds. Their exchange unfolded with a quiet intellectual intimacy, touching on literature, exile, and the intricate geometry of identity that threads through Cristóbal. Dr Poppe Mujica, with her characteristic insight and grace, drew from Gabriel reflections on the spiritual architecture of his work — on how the novel, with its fractures and silences, mirrors the human condition itself.
It was Gabriel himself who had extended his personal invitation to me. To describe Gabriel is to attempt to describe a paradox. I still recall our first meeting, his striking blue eyes—rare in their depth, European in their clarity—set against an elegance that seemed timeless. I teased him then, christening him El Conquistador, convinced his ancestors must have been men of armour and empire. Yet Gabriel is no conquistador of territory; he is a conquistador of silence, of memory, of forgotten tongues. A man whose greatest conquest lies in the way he champions art and artists, a passion I share profoundly.
That evening, as he stood beneath the banners of his nation, Gabriel spoke with a quiet gravitas. His words transcended mere introduction: they were invocation. “We are all travellers,” he said, his voice carrying across the Embassy’s salons, “and we all carry scars. Yet somehow, through these scars, we find a place we can call home.”
He recalled the hesitation of one painter, reluctant to present a canvas marked by a crack sustained on its journey from Spain to London. But Gabriel reframed the wound not as a flaw but as testimony. “Cracks,” he told us, “are more authentic.
They tell a story of survival. They make things, and people, unique in their own right.”
The artists who answered his call did so with singular devotion: Elke McDonald, Ricardo Cinalli, Juan José Jiménez, Ananú Gonzalez Posada, José Bazo, Enrique Leguía, Santiago Álvarez, and José Manuel Barahona. Their works formed not a mere exhibition but a dialogue with Cristóbal, that enigmatic text Gabriel himself once described as a “gnostic codex,” fragmentary, insurgent, and profoundly unmarketable by conventional standards. Each artist, with brush or pigment, interpreted the fissures and labyrinths of the novel—its refusal of linearity, its weaving of Quechua tenderness, Latin mystery, Spanish heritage, and English dislocation into a polyphonic map of exile and belonging.
The Embassy itself seemed transformed into a gallery of wounds and revelations. Canvases glowed against high cream walls, each painting a shard of allegory echoing the novel’s fifty-three fragments. This was no exhibition to soothe the eye—it was one to unsettle, to remind us that beauty is inseparable from rupture, that art, like life, is most profound where it resists clarity.
As I wandered through the rooms—accompanied by my dear companions, entrepreneur Patrycia Matuszak and the ever-graceful Lana Saliot—I felt the rare electricity of an evening where art does not flatter but interrogates. Here, McDonald’s textured vision conversed with Cinalli’s bold iconography; there, the spectral worlds of Bazo and Álvarez unsettled familiar categories of identity and belonging. Leguía and Barahona summoned allegories of history and loss, while Jiménez and Gonzalez Posada traced new cartographies of memory.
All of it seemed to orbit Gabriel himself, the quiet centre of this constellation. His novel, Cristóbal, is not merely a book—it is an act of rebellion against the canon, against clarity, against the monolingual empire. Written in London yet echoing with the cadences of Lima and the whispers of Quechua, it refuses the linear novelistic tradition. Instead, it fragments, resists, multiplies. It creates what Walter Benjamin once called a constellation of meaning: moments of lightning that illuminate without explaining, flashes that open the labyrinth rather than closing it.
The Peruvian Embassy that evening did not present art; it presented an epistemology. It reminded us that scars are not erasures but signatures, that cracks are not fractures but windows. And it reminded me—once more—of the man with blue eyes who, rather than conquering, has chosen to redeem. Gabriel Núñez del Prado has given us not only a novel but a vision: of a world where what is marginal becomes central, where silence speaks, and where every scar is simply another name for home.
Photography: Luca Dicorato
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