
Manimal, 2005
Direction by Carlos Amorales, Mexican
Animation by Ivan Martinez Lopez
Music by Julián Lede
Digital animation
Duration; 5 minutes, 26 seconds
Courtesy Carlos Amorales and Yvon Lambert Gallery New York/Paris
The unique visual vocabulary that has become Carlos Amorales’s signature
style stems from his
Liquid Archive, a digital database containing hundreds of drawings generated by the artist and subsequently used and reused in his multifaceted body of work. Begun in 1999, this growing collection of
images is the tool that unifies Amorales’s artistic oeuvre as its motifs migrate
from medium to medium. For example, the spider webs, birds, kneeling
figures, and silhouettes of trees used in the series of drawings
Selected Ghosts (composition) (2008), presented in this exhibition, have appeared in previous drawings, animations, installations, and performances. In these drawings, the artist uses vector graphics to generate the outline of these familiar images, creating a sense that the images are on the verge of disappearing, and capturing their silhouettes just before the moment of dissolution, like the aura of a ghost. As an image bank, Amorales’s archive becomes a visual vocabulary intended for collaborative use and reinterpretation, with the artist positioned as a critical filter, an interface between forms and their potential meaning. In his two-channel projection of video and animation
Dark Mirror (2004), for instance, Amorales commissioned a graphic designer to create an animation using the archive and concurrently asked a musician to generate a score inspired by a selection of images derived from the same source. Together the two facets of the work form a coherent whole that positions Amorales in the role of editor or director. The way in which he allows the element of chance to define the final result of such collaboration reverberates with the open-ended scenarios he constructs in the works originating in the archive, particularly his animations.

Black Cloud, 2007
Carlos Amorales, Mexican
Black paper moths
Collection of Diane and Bruce Halle
In these animations, nonfigurative elements complement images from the
archive that are commonly associated with terror in the popular imagination,
such as wolves, monsters, and hybrid creatures. Although the images
are identifiable, it is the narrative into which they are incorporated that
challenges and discomforts the viewer, an intentional strategy on the part of
the artist, who tries to unsettle any sense of familiarity that could be associated
with his choice of images. Like his drawings, the animations make reference
to the concept of evil by summoning up the horror and fear associated with
its presence in both the collective and individual subconscious. By giving form to these emotions, Amorales’s work fulfills both a cathartic function,
by allowing the audience to purge these feelings, and an apotropaic one,
by deflecting these negative elements from those who encounter them. And
while he allows for an accessible point of entry into his dark fantasies, once
that threshold is crossed, it becomes entirely the viewer’s responsibility to
create his or her own story. Amorales’s animations make that task particularly
challenging by alternating between abstraction and figuration, narrative and
nonnarrative sequences.

Faces, 2007
Direction by Carlos Amorales, Mexican
Animation by Ivan Martinez Lopez
Music concept by Julián Lede
Digital animation after paper cutout plates
Duration; 11 minutes, 36 seconds
Courtesy Carlos Amorales and Yvon Lambert Gallery New York/Paris
One of Amorales’s first animations,
Rorschach Test Animation (2004),
brings into focus the artist’s interest in abstraction and its potential for free
association. Used as a means of psychological evaluation, the Rorschach
test requires subjects to state what they see when confronted with ten
bilaterally symmetrical inkblots. Taking the test as a point of departure, the
artist generates a series of inkblots whose shape changes as the black spots
progressively increase and decrease in number, producing new forms against
the white background. Like test subjects, viewers of Amorales’s animation are
invited to use their imagination to construct the meaning of what they see. By
creating new combinations, the animation allows that imagination to expand
beyond the test’s original purpose. In these sequences of changing inkblots
lies the potential for a narrative to surface, one shaped by the subjectivity of
visual free association.

Manimal, 2005
Direction by Carlos Amorales, Mexican
Animation by Ivan Martinez Lopez
Music by Julián Lede
Digital animation
Duration; 5 minutes, 26 seconds
Courtesy Carlos Amorales and Yvon Lambert Gallery New York/Paris
Amorales more clearly pursues the concept of a narrative animation in
Manimal (2005), one of his most ambitious black-and-white, single-channel videos. By combining three-dimensional animation techniques with two-dimensional drawings of silhouettes, the artist produces the effect of a
virtual shadow theater. The accompanying soundtrack by Julián Lede is
characterized by an electric heavy-metal rhythm whose mounting intensity
creates a sense of tension as a story slowly emerges. In a postapocalyptic
landscape dominated by barren trees and two glowing moons, a pack of
wolves migrates from the wilderness to an urban environment by crossing
an abandoned airstrip where several passenger planes are positioned. The
only indication of a human presence is the erratic flight of a number of
airplanes in the dark sky. Although the elements of a traditional narrative are
in place, making sense of the sequence demands an imaginative effort. This is
undoubtedly a dark tale, one in which, as the title suggests, man and animal
have morphed into one sinister creature.
In staging the drama of
Manimal, Amorales chose for his cityscape adobe-style houses that resemble dwellings in the working-class districts of Mexico City. By choosing a familiar setting, the artist makes the game of free association personal, as aspects of his own life permeate the work. His critical voice clearly emerges as he presents an allegorical interpretation of the collective fears experienced by contemporary society. The barbed-wire fence separating the feral creatures from the realm of humans could be interpreted as a reference to current debate on anti-immigration policies designed to keep at bay those perceived to be different or dangerous. The alien element is never
clearly defined in the video since its existence is a construct of the discourse
of fear prevalent in today’s sociopolitical climate. However, Amorales’s
crossbred creature carries the burden of the psychological damage inflicted
by this discourse of fear. Its very hybridity reveals how the object of fear is
already part of one’s mental and emotional makeup—that, as in
Manimal, the monsters live within us rather than among us. In this animation, the artist’s critical perspective clearly emerges as he presents his personal view of a world veiled in fear.

Faces, 2007
Direction by Carlos Amorales, Mexican
Animation by Ivan Martinez Lopez
Music concept by Julián Lede
Digital animation after paper cutout plates
Duration; 11 minutes, 36 seconds
Courtesy Carlos Amorales and Yvon Lambert Gallery New York/Paris
Hybridity returns as a motif in
Faces (2007), Amorales’s most recent black-and-white animation, in which he renews his efforts to build an abstract visual vocabulary of horror by amalgamating elements from his
Liquid Archive at a fast-paced rhythm. From the multitude of shapes and forms that race across the screen, untamed gazes, masked faces, and carved profiles emerge for a split second only to disappear again in the amorphous mass that spewed them out. In
Faces, the figurative components of the archive are pushed to the limits of representation. Here a new abstract language surfaces as Amorales’s technique emulates the gestural painting method of Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock. The playfulness of
Rorschach Test Animation comes to mind as the viewer struggles to identify familiar figures among the suggestive graphic forms that appear at an increasing speed. The rhythm of the animation sequences is dictated by a musical soundtrack in which sides A and B of a 1950s album of atonal music are played simultaneously with
surprisingly harmonious results. Now and again an extraordinary, clearly
defined face struggles to emerge from the nebulous fusion of shapes. For
an instant it appears to gain enough materiality to jump out and exist as an
independent physical object, but the illusion is short-lived and the features
of the face return to the chaos from which they came, not to be seen again.
This sense of materiality is the result of an animation technique employed
by Amorales, where real faces covered in makeup and paper cutouts of
various elements from the archive are manipulated and imbued with three-dimensional qualities.

Black Cloud, 2007
Carlos Amorales, Mexican
Black paper moths
Collection of Diane and Bruce Halle
With
Black Cloud (2007), Amorales takes the
Liquid Archive into the three-dimensional realm, materializing its potential for communicating terror by giving it an overwhelming physical presence. The artist replicates thirty-six
types of moths—all culled from his archive—in thousands of life-size, black
paper cutouts that are individually hand glued to the walls and ceiling of a
space. Multiplied to create a dense mass with both wondrous and threatening
qualities,
Black Cloud becomes a surreal yet sublime gathering of insects delicately poised in sculptural formations that suggest the potential for
harm, destruction, and irreversible doom. The biblical plagues of the Old Testament come to mind, as two of the ten calamities inflicted by God on
Egypt, and recounted in Exodus, involved swarms of flies and locusts. The
association of such a spectacular installation with a Judgment Day narrative
indicates Amorales’s propensity toward ambiguous scenarios where the
boundaries between beauty and awe, good and evil, calm and calamity are
constantly blurred and where imagination is called upon to mediate between
multiple interpretations of the work.
As
Four Animations, Five Drawings, and a Plague confirms, Amorales’s
diverse artistic production is characterized by an abstract vocabulary of
fantasy that invokes collective experiences of fear and horror as it sparks the
imagination. While building this lexicon of the macabre, the artist reveals
his personal vision of the world and a profound involvement with the artistic
process through which he expresses it. In combining the visual motifs of the
Liquid Archive and transposing them in various mediums, Amorales creates new and exhilarating works of art demonstrating not only that a unique
visual language can still emerge but also that, as he strongly believes, the
artist’s critical voice is imperative as the art and the everyday become more
indistinguishable.
Carlos Amorales
Mexican
Born 1970
The Forest
2003
Digital animation; 1 minute, 38 seconds
Direction, animation, and music by Carlos Amorales
Rorschach Animation Test
2004
Digital animation; 5 minutes, 24 seconds
Direction, animation, and music by Carlos Amorales
Manimal
2005
Digital animation; 5 minutes, 26 seconds
Direction by Carlos Amorales
Animation by Ivan Martinez Lopez
Music by Julián Lede
Faces
2007
Digital animation after paper cutout plates; 11 minutes, 36 seconds
Direction by Carlos Amorales
Animation by Ivan Martinez Lopez
Music concept by Julián Lede
Black Cloud
2007
Black paper moths
Collection of Diane and Bruce Halle
Selected Ghosts (composition) 01
2008
Paper collage
Selected Ghosts (composition) 02
2008
Paper collage
Selected Ghosts (composition) 03
2008
Paper collage
Selected Ghosts (composition) 04
2008
Paper collage
Selected Ghosts (composition) 05
2008
Paper collage
All animations and collages courtesy Carlos Amorales and Yvon Lambert Gallery New York/Paris.