Carlos Amorales
From Useless Wonder 04
2007
From Useless Wonder 04
The large oil painting From Useless Wonder 04 shows a moment from Carlos Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006). The video is based on Edgar Allen Poe’s 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. The painting, derived from an image from a different, preexisting work, represents the artist’s continued interest in realizing particular subject matter in alternative forms, thereby imbuing it with new meanings and interpretations.
Carlos Amorales works in various mediums, including video, drawing, painting, photography, installation, animation, and performance. Central to his practice 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. He transforms this iconographic store into his signature graphic style which then transfers into his practice which involves paintings, drawings and installations, video animations and performances. He works with motion graphic designers, media researchers, and musicians to explore collective unconsciousness based on media-driven codes of perception and spectacle.