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Useless Wonder
2006
Two-channel video projection on suspended screen
Dimensions: 8' 36"
(colour, sound)
7' 51"
(black and white, silent)
Screen: 244 x 320 cm
Reference: ACF0002
Edition: 4/5
Photograph:
© courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City
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Since 1999 Carlos Amorales (Mexico City, Mexico, 1970) has been compiling an extensive repertoire of digital images that then become iconographicand lexical bases for many of his works. Trained as a painter and yet dissatisfied with painting, over the course of six years he consolidated a line of performative research for his self-construction as an artist. Wearing a wrestling mask and an elegant manager’s suit, his alter ego took part in social acts and museum exhibitions, playing with the dichotomy between anonymity and identity.
His return to drawing was performed in the animation studio he founded in Mexico City in2003, where he collaborated with designers, graphicartists and musicians. The silhouettes composed by his animations are classified in a huge databasehe calls “Liquid Archive”. They are synthetic and combinative graphic figures in an ongoing process of association and transformation which shape avocabulary of hybrid signs that is multiplied and fragmented, that invents new forms and ends up generating ghostly creatures and landscapes.
Useless Wonder is a video projection of two contrasting and complementary animations on the two sides of a single screen suspended diagonally in the exhibition space. On one side of the screena world map disintegrates into small fragments and is then recomposed to once again begin the process of fracture and relocation. The references to the separation of tectonic plates open up to metaphorical interpretations of the disintegrationof the contemporary world. On the other side of the screen, animals, landscapes and human figures are projected in the basic colours of red, white and black. This apocalyptic stroll begins and ends, filmically, with birds, and the culminating moment is when the birds become more numerous and attack the figure of a woman whose body is spattered with red stains. The intensity of the music increases the feeling of chaos and uncertainty of this symphony of spectres. Amorales himself states that his workdeals with the atavisms that remain in our contemporary minds and that his catastrophic feeling is rooted in his teenage experience of the violentearthquake that ravaged Mexico in 1985.
