Carlos Amorales: Black Cloud, Kunstmuseum Brandts
-
-
Carlos Amorales
Black CloudDecember 1, 2023 – August 18, 2024
Kunstmuseum brandts, Odense, DK
Tens of thousands of black butterflies occupy the Kunsthallen at Brandts when Mexican Carlos Amorales' installation Black Cloud is exhibited for the first time in Denmark . The work Black Cloud by Mexican Carlos Amorales appears as gloomy and poetic as its title. More than 50,000 black butterflies in laser-cut paper swarm everywhere, in cloud-like clusters - on walls and posts, in windows, down from ceilings, up in corners. Individually, the fine paper insects are beautiful and fragile. In large clusters, they become a potential threat, bringing to mind biblical plagues and something completely uncontrollable. The seductive beauty goes hand in hand with the horrifying.
A WORK BECOMES
Carlos Amorales was originally inspired for Black Cloud on a sleepless night during a last visit to his grandmother, who was dying at the time. Lying there in the dark, Amorales suddenly saw a room full of black butterflies before his inner gaze. The vision was so clear and insistent that Amorales felt he had to make it a reality. It started with a production of paper butterflies that were first installed in the artist's own studio in Mexico City.The black swarms spread and it ended with Amorales and his assistants having produced and installed so many that they had to leave the premises because all the space was taken over by small paper insects. Since then, Black Cloud has migrated away from its birthplace and, in various versions, has invaded several major international art museums and private art collections.
BLACK CLOUD RUNS AWAY
In addition to settling in art institutions around the world, Black Cloud has lived a bizarre parallel life in popular culture that Carlos Amorales has had no control over. The work's black butterflies suddenly appeared in 2007 as a motif at the exclusive fashion house Dior and subsequently at Diana von Fürstenberg and Dolce & Gabbana, among others. Typically, a trend starts with the exclusive brands, after which chains such as H&M quickly absorb the trends and change them to fast fashion. And of course that also happened with Amorales' black butterflies. Suddenly they were swarming around on underwear and dresses in thrift stores all over the world, and they even spread to wallpapers, notebooks and stickers.“ I would like to think that the authorship of an image initially of this kind - a cloud of black butterflies - after it has been stolen by so many people, becomes part of the public domain: now it belongs to all of us. “ - Carlos Amorales
In other words, it is a wildly growing installation that is set free when a completely new version of Black Cloud occupies the art gallery at Art Museum Brandts. In harmony with the installation, Carlos Amorales has also created a series of new paintings especially for the exhibition in the Kunsthallen at Brandts. The paintings show both organic and structured repetitions of motifs and thus contain a form of encrypted poems.
Carlos Amorales is educated at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. Amorales has exhibited at, among others, the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, the Phoenix Art Museum in the USA and the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. He represented Mexico at the Venice Biennale in 2017. Carlos Amorales lives and works in Mexico City.
-
Installation views
-
