Why fear the future?

2005 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

29,7 x 41,3 cm

Carlos Amorales

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Produced on the occasion of an exhibition at ARTIUM of Alava, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, this deck of cards is a selection of images from Carlos Amorales’s Liquid Archive. and abstract silhouetted motifs, in a black and white palette, are combined to create a world lodged between fantasy and reality typical of the tarot game. Airplanes, letters, naked women, Osama Bin Laden, Che Guevara, mythological figures, skulls, wrestlers’ masks are some of the visuals that populate this printed object. It was distributed to fortune-tellers for their interpretation of the future. It is also presented framed and hung in a grid or as an artist’s book. Jennifer Allen writes in artforum (Summer 2005): “Surfaces can serve blindness and vision: images, decoration and destiny. While linking clairvoyants, psychologists, and art critics as interpreters, Amorales also levels the hierarchy between artists, whose creations are generally treated as singular, and actors and musicians, who often interpret works that have already been produced or performed by others. In the era of postproduction – where images tend to be ready-made – the artist is simply a point of distribution, not the origin of images.” An edition exists in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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Carlos Amorales, based in Mexico City, works in many media and combinations thereof, including video, drawing, painting, photography, installation, animation, and performance. Central in his work is the construction and alteration of what he calls his Liquid Archive, a collection of images, narratives, drawings, shapes, and ideas that he uses to construct his unique visual language—a critical and stimulating space for fantasy, reality, and the blurring of the two. Amorales creates tensions between revealing and hiding the personal and the universal in his often-ambiguous and fluid constructions.

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Colors:

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• fantasy.n.01
• picture.n.01
• future.n.01
• artist.n.01
• clairvoyant.n.01
• psychology.n.01
• collective history
• contemporary conceptualism
• cultural commentary
• design
• mexican
• mexican contemporary artists