Carlos Amorales: Backdrops for ghosts

The exhibition Backdrops for ghosts will contain a series of new three-dimensional paintings with silkscreen ink on wooden panels, an installation of maquettes previously used for the artist’s film The Cursed Village shown at the 57th Venice Biennale and site-specific shadow paintings directly on the walls of the gallery space. Amorales’ work is interdisciplinary where the limits and coherence of art and society are explored in relation to language and the individual.

In 2017 Amorales represented Mexico at the Venice Biennale with the project Life in The Folds – a project that created new vocabularies, languages and settings through which life can reinvent itself. Starting out with paper cut-out shapes, Amorales created a series of abstract colorful collages – these abstractions became an illegible alphabet and a series of musical instruments that gave sound to each letter. All aspects were combined in the production of the puppet film The Cursed Village – a film telling the story of an immigrant family, whose destiny ends with being lynched in the foreign town. The maquettes from the film are placed as the central installation in the gallery and allow the viewer to become immersed in a fairytale world, that nevertheless points to urgent political issues.

Amorales develops compositions and works that range from abstraction to conceptualization before converting into a phonetic language system and three-dimensional forms. In Backdrops for ghosts Amorales pushes visual abstraction into figuration and storytelling where the viewer will be absorbed by both a painting exhibition and a large puppet show. Amorales plays with the classical notions by inverting form and background. The characters in the exhibition are transformed into shadow paintings on the walls, whereas the backgrounds where they normally would be placed to perform, hang forward as a series of large scale painted wood collages. By placing the backdrop in the foreground, the exhibition Backdrops for Ghosts points towards a contemporary world that appears as upside down.

Kilde: Nils Stærk