Carlos Amorales. Living on the outside of one’s own home

Carlos Amorales.
Living on the outside of one’s own home
In dialogue with Benjamín Mayer Foulkes
Curated by Michel Blancsubé
May – September 2010

2 Sur 708, Centro Histórico
Puebla, Pue., 72000
Mexico
difusion [​at​] museoamparo.com
www.museoamparo.com

Carlos Amorales began his career in the mid-90s with the creation of the identity loan project titled Amorales, a fictitious personality constructed as a substitute for his own public identity. Later, he introduced wrestling into the art world as a space for reflection on the competitive nature of the artist in the contemporary world. Between 1996 and 2003, he developed works in relation to this public representation of the struggle between good and evil: Ray Rosas (Fragments from a Conversation), Amorales Interim, and Arena Dos de Mayo, a trilogy of videos from 1997 evoke this period of his career.

Between 2000 and 2010, Amorales produced almost 3,000 digital graphic elements as part of his Liquid Archive, in which birds, spider webs, and butterflies are some of the recurring motifs. The Dark Mirror Sculpture, a 13-foot fragmented bird; One Mile String, a shattered mirror in the form of a spider-web; Black Cloud, a cloud of 6,000 butterflies; and the double projection Useless Wonder are some of the works created upon the activating of this archive.

The invitation that Museo Amparo made to the artist with the purpose of creating work related to its pre-Hispanic collection provoked Amorales to question his own visual language. This confrontation with Mexico´s national history, as well as the rhetoric involved in its institutional presentation gave way to a series of statements used by the artist to propose a contemporary reading of the pre-Hispanic collection.

This resulted in four new works which function synergistically using two short films as centerpoints: Herramientas de trabajo (Work Tools) a black and white animation that deconstructs the Liquid Archive and its methodology, and the second La hora nacional (The National Hour), a color film with sound that is a reflection on the pre-Hispanic collection and proposes a radical rupture from the institutional interpretation of Mexican history. In addition to the films, El estudio por la ventana (The Studio by the Window) displays graffiti on the original walls of the Museum using stencils designed by the artist based on various images of the Liquid Archive. Lastly, using the image of an eagle’s head as a metaphor for the decapitation of power, Incorruptible is a sculptural work that synthesizes the formal fusion between a specific Mayan style and the artist’s graphic work; both are laid along the walls and floors between the above-described films.