Carlos Amorales

Why Fear the Future?

Produced on the occasion of an exhibition at ARTIUM of Alava, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, this deck of cards titled Why fear the future? is a selection of images from Carlos Amorales’s Liquid Archive. Abstract silhouetted motifs, in a black and white palette, are combined to create a world lodged between fantasy and reality typical of the tarot game. Airplanes, letters, naked women, Osama Bin Laden, Che Guevara, mythological figures, skulls, wrestlers’ masks are some of the visuals that populate this printed object. It was distributed to fortune-tellers for their interpretation of the future. It is also presented framed and hung in a grid or as an artist’s book. Jennifer Allen writes in artforum (Summer 2005): “Surfaces can serve blindness and vision: images, decoration and destiny. While linking clairvoyants, psychologists, and art critics as interpreters, Amorales also levels the hierarchy between artists, whose creations are generally treated as singular, and actors and musicians, who often interpret works that have already been produced or performed by others. In the era of postproduction – where images tend to be ready-made – the artist is simply a point of distribution, not the origin of images.”