Santos de palo are six-to-eighteen-inch saints cut from Spanish cedar by farmers who carved on the side. They lived on household altars, not in churches, and families repainted them as an act of devotion — gesso under lead white under zinc white, gilt worn off the high points, black fill chipped back to bare wood.

This system takes that stratigraphy literally. Surfaces recess instead of lifting, colour arrives as a repainted layer rather than a fill, and gold shows up only as a thin worn line. Objects sit one to a niche, centred and frontal, grouped in threes after the Three Kings.