15,000 butterflies take over Fondazione Adolfo Pini for Carlos Amorales’ exhibition

Fondazione Adolfo Pini presented the exhibition The Accursed Hour by artist Carlos Amorales on the occasion of Miart 2019 in Milan. Curated by Gabi Scardi, the exhibition was on view from April 2 to July 8, 2019.

Amorales is interested in language, images, and their transformation. More generally, he takes an interest in communication systems, their constant renewal, their potentialities and pitfalls; as well as the mechanisms that allow particular narratives to emerge at the expense of others; and, by extension, the issue of dominant representation, the manipulation of communication and thought. In his work, visual art, music, animation and poetry converge, all interpreted, with great formal rigour, through a deep awareness of the present time and its tensions.

For Fondazione Adolfo Pini, Amorales conceived the exhibition The Accursed Hour, which focused on his life-size installation Black Cloud and on various elements, from the project Life in the folds. The exhibition also included silhouettes and other works by the artist, in a continuous shift between images and signs.

With Black Cloud, a swarm of thousands of black butterflies invaded the premises of the Foundation, starting from the staircase at the entrance. Fifteen thousand butterflies populated the new and the already existing spaces of the Foundation. With Life in the folds, the artist captured the theme of human violence against other human beings. A kind of violence that lies deep within and that can explode in unjustified ways.

The project also included an animation video that told a dramatic story, while at the same time showed the hands of a puppeteer moving the characters' threads: a metaphor of the mystification to which history and our own actions are subjected, whether we are aware of it or not. From this central nucleus stemmed a variety of transpositions. Among the others: a large installation and a series of ocarinas, each of which had the shape of a sign and which all together created a coded language that can be both 'read' and 'played'. Their sound was also used as the video’s soundtrack. Some shapes appeared on the walls of the Foundation as if they went through them: they are human silhouettes and seem to hold some papers in which the salient moments of history are represented. The exhibition also included the story-board in which the video’s characters and story came to life for the first time.

With this exhibition, Amorales referred to his country, Mexico, while at the same time showed extremely current discrepancies and tensions throughout the world, and the need to identify the origins of our ghosts, to recognise their scope, matrix, and ideological value.