Carlos Amorales

French Calendar Paintings is a series of twelve paintings that stems from The Liquid Archive, a visual vocabulary of images that Amorales developed in the early 2000s and employed across animations, drawings, and installations. The series marks an important shift in his practice, introducing an exploration of abstraction through the transformation of figurative imagery into an illegible visual language – a line of inquiry that would continue to shape many of his subsequent projects. The title refers to the French Revolutionary Calendar, introduced as part of a broader effort to replace established religious and monarchical structures with new social and political systems.

This investigation into language and abstraction continues in Partituras para ocarinas por azar, a series of abstract collages based on a coded alphabet developed by the artist over the past decade and employed in various projects, including work presented at the 57th Venice Biennale. Constructed from cut-paper shapes arranged like an unreadable text, the collages evoke secret messages or fragmented narratives. Built entirely from gradients rather than flat colors, the works generate shifting rhythms of movement and contrast while transforming fragmented forms into dense visual fields that suggest language, memory, and hidden meaning.