Tens of thousands of black butterflies will take over Kunsthallen at Brandts when Mexican artist Carlos Amorales’ overwhelming piece Black Cloud is exhibited for the first time in Denmark.
Carlos Amorales – Black Cloud will be on display from December 1, 2023, at Kunstmuseum Brandts.
Individually, the delicate paper insects are stunning and fragile. In large flocks, however, they transform into a potentially threat, bringing to mind biblical plagues and something completely uncontrollable.
More than 50,000 black butterflies, laser-cut from paper, swarm in cloud-like clusters everywhere – on walls and pillars, on windows, on ceilings, and in corners – when the poetic exhibition Black Cloud opens.
Carlos Amorales was born in Mexico City in 1970 and has studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. He has had numerous international solo exhibitions in the Netherlands, the USA, and Mexico, and in 2017 he represented Mexico at the Venice Biennale.
Amorales seeks to expand our understanding of communication...beyond the spoken language. He illustrates how communication also takes place on an intuitive, cultural, and spatial level. He expresses himself predominantly through the mediums of installation art and painting, combining subculture, popular culture, and traditional craftsmanship.
- The Carlos Amorales exhibition is a beautiful and moving experience that sprawls over several floors of the museum. It is a black swarm of unpredictability that mirrors the turbulent world we live in. At the same time, the exhibition also demonstrates how the world map of art is global, says director of Kunstmuseum Brandts, Stine Høholt.
To coincide with the installation of the butterflies, Carlos Amorales has created a series of new paintings especially for Brandts. The paintings are based on a graphic alphabet that he often uses in his works. While the capitalized letters, shapes, and symbols can appear chaotic, they also form organic patterns that quiver and shimmer like butterflies. Also in these paintings, he operates at the intersection of intuition and fact.
MELLEM SORG OG KAOSTEORI
Carlos Amorales was inspired to create Black Cloud one night while visiting his beloved grandmother who was dying. In the darkness, Amorales suddenly saw, in his mind’s eye, a room full of fluttering black butter- flies. The vision was so vivid and insistent that Amorales felt called to bring it to life.
The installation is based on personal experiences combined with scientific chaos theory and research. Over a number of years, Amorales has collected a large digital archive of images of birds, spiders, trees, wolves, and human figures found on the internet or cut out from books, magazines, or his own photos and processed into black silhouettes.
- Carlos Amorales’ butterflies are easy to love because they are alluring and beautiful. But the seductive always goes hand in hand with the horrifying. Beneath the surface, he is a complex artist who, on the one hand, works with science and reality: if you touch a butterfly wing, it is destroyed, and if a butterfly flaps its wings in one place, can it cause a tsunami in another? These questions are posed while, at the same time, the piece conveys a universal, transformational image of relatable grief and the journey of the soul, says Marianne Ager, curator of the exhibition.
AN UNCONTROLLABLE JOURNEY
This is the first time the black butterflies are exhibited at a museum in Denmark, but even if you haven’t seen them on display before, they might seem familiar. Black Cloud has lived a remarkable parallel life within popular culture since 2007, when the black butterflies suddenly became a motif for the exclusive fashion house Dior and later also for Diane von Furstenberg and Dolce & Gabbana, among others. Subse- quently, the big clothing brands followed, and suddenly the black silhouettes were swarming on underwear and dresses in high street stores all over the world, from where they spread to wallpapers, notebooks, and stickers.
When a woman sent Carlos Amorales a photo depicting her tattoos of his black butterflies, he initially felt he had lost control of his artwork. He concluded, however, that it was an interesting reflection of the con- temporary proliferation of viral communication, in which one can lose control of a message or an image, and so today he is happy that his black butterflies live an independent life in the public space.
- It becomes relevant that this image starts as an intimate, inner image of mine, travels through the art world and the fashion industry, first on the outside of clothing, then on underwear, and finally settles on the skin of another human being, says Carlos Amorales.
FACT BOX
Carlos Amorales has studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. Amorales has exhibited at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, Phoenix Art Museum in the USA, and Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. Amorales represented Mexico at the Venice Biennale in 2017, and he is represented in numerous museum collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, Tate Modern, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, and Museo Jumex.
Carlos Amorales lives and works in Mexico City.
Entrada actualizada el el 09 ene de 2024
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