Black cloud: Carlos Amorales and the spooky beautiful

Madrid,

Spatial projects, installations, paintings, drawings, videos, engravings, textiles, animations and sound works have been part of Carlos Amorales’ production since the nineties. An almost founding figure of recent Mexican art, he trained at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and there, in Holland, he adopted the name by which we know him, as part of an investigation into the possible functions of art in everyday life. He also lent his name and attributes (Amorales was a masked figure inspired by Mexican wrestling athletes) to other artists and also to wrestlers, friends or strangers, who participated using that name and covering their faces in fights or performances in artistic institutions in Europe (Tate, Center Pompidou), the United States and Mexico.

In 2004 he would leave Holland to return to Mexico City, and there he established his own studio, which he called The Factory inspired by Andy Warhol and the first animation workshop that Walt Disney created. Amorales and his team would create a bank of digital images, called LiquidArchivewhich contains thousands of monochrome silhouettes in vector format and which has been the basis of this author’s very diverse production over the last two decades. Most of these images are open source and there are hardly any boundaries between the artistic and the commercial: they can be used in the fields of fashion, music videos, album covers or tattoos.

The Amorales factory and what springs from it is, as a whole, a nod to pop culture, but also the conscious fruit of our economic system, in which, in the Mexican’s words, The globalized assembly line has gotten a little out of hand.

The artist moves with intelligence, and also subtlety, between the aesthetic and the sociopolitical: he highlights, for the viewer, a multitude of issues, from the role of the author outside and inside the field of creation to the experience of those who have to acclimatize to unknown cultures, passing through the infinite malleability of language and the torrent of images that flood the Internet.

Carlos Amorales. Black cloud. Casa de México Foundation in Madrid

Share traces of these features of your installation career black cloudwhich Amorales is now exhibiting at the Casa de México Foundation in Madrid. He was born in 2007, after visiting his grandmother when she was about to die and after reading the novel Austerlitzby WG Sebald, which contains references to Darwin’s description of a flock of butterflies so immense that it was almost impossible to see the sky.

Since then, almost twenty years ago, this work has traveled around the world: from his studio to New York and, later, to a French school, to the Palazzo delle Esposizione in Rome or Tegucigalpa; will soon be seen inside a Norwegian lighthouse. The dimensions of this plague of beautiful moths have been adapted to their different exhibition spaces – they have been shown both outdoors and indoors – and, although at first glance it is difficult to perceive, they are rarely the same between them: made with techniques similar to origami, by folding, they respond to thirty different models of figures and sometimes incorporate textures.

For Amorales, they have an obvious relationship with the genre of vanitas and the farewell to their grandmother, and they test the possibility of drawing space, but where they have been shown, very diverse meanings have been assigned to these butterflies, linked to migrations, to the pollution that would dirty them, to bad luck, to death, to the strength of the mass, to the threats that hide beauty, to lightness. The artist neither adopts any of these readings nor renounces them: it is important that viewers can interpret them freely and expand their meanings, as is the case with that LiquidArchiveone of his greatest sources when creating drawings, slides, videos, collages, paintings, sculptures or installations.

Creepy and necessarily beautiful, almost individually sculptural, these nearly 25,000 moths are something of an emblem of the ambiguous and achieve a high visual impact from very simple procedures. Although never spontaneous: their disposition is very natural, like the one a certain plague would take, but it derives from the manual drawing of lines and their progressive widening.

Speaking of drawing, Amorales is currently working drawing with crayons and experimenting with artificial intelligence, looking for the links between war of the worlds of Herbert George Wells and international relations based on colonialist postulates.