curated by Daniela Lancioni
9 November 2010 - 27 February 2011
Carlos Amorales stepped to the fore on the international scene with his surprising visionary capacity and the ultramodern sensitivity with which he elaborates and mixes multiple and opposite elements. In this show, his first in Italy, he experiments with an unprecedented way of setting the works together: five installations and one performance, created between 2005 and 2010, in an uninterrupted succession and in part overlapping. The exhibition title Remix, a musical term, derives from this choice of amplifying the hybridisation process that lies at the origin of each individual work.§
Much of the exhibition space is occupied by the 2010 pencil drawing El estudio por la ventana [Throwing the Studio out of the Window] which marks the beginning of a new reflection on the studio understood as the artist's mind. In the large gallery the drawing forms a background to the seven hundred and fifty-one fragments of Drifting Star (2010). Suspended in a powerful freeze-frame they may arouse disquiet, but also be understood as the manifestation of a euphoric state, a victory over time, a moment pervaded with joie de vivre. Black Cloud (2007) is a remarkable swarm of black butterflies whose presence may be interpreted as a threat or as the sign of collective strength: a monumental work, seductive and enveloping, which has the solidity of a mass and the lightness of a lepidopteron wing. Several walls are covered with the posters of Why Fear the Future? (2006), the silhouettes of birds with wings spread through which Amorales faces the future, posing a question that might dispel such fear. The Skeleton Image Constellation (Liquid Archive) of 2009 comprises cards with more than a thousand images, drawn from Amorales' personal Archivo líquido and offered as gifts to visitors. Along the boundary lines between one work and the other, the drawing overlaps the posters or the butterflies alight on the drawing. Each one of these works is approached now and then by an animated presence, the only coloured one in the strictly black and white panorama of the exhibition. This happens in the course of the performance Spider Galaxy (2007) when Galia Eibenschutz or students from the Accademia Nazionale di Danza brush against now one and now another of the works, wearing a costume that vaguely resembles an exotic bird.
All the works on show derive from the huge Archivo líquido, a digital archive which Amorales began in the late 90s. It is in continual expansion and the artist draws on it for each new work: images taken from magazines, catalogues and books, photos by Amorales himself or downloaded on Internet which, transformed through inventive and technical processes, become drawings, slides, videos, collages, paintings, sculptures, installations and disc covers.
The Liquid Archive is a kind of glossary and Amorales feels it important that others should use and interpret it, extending its significance. At the Palazzo delle Esposizioni a group of students installed, interpreting them, the works El estudio por la ventana and Black Cloud. Their collaboration took place in the context of a seminar held by Professor Claudio Zambianchi of the Facoltà di Scienze Umanistiche - Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza".
The exhibition is curated by Daniela Lancioni, senior curator at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni.