The first ever retrospective exhibition in Europe of the work of Carlos Amorales at Stedelijk during Amsterdam Art Weekend 2019. Spanning 14 rooms of the museum, the exhibition includes spatial works, installations, paintings, drawings, videos, prints, textiles, animations, and sound works, which Amorales incorporates in his open, non-chronological, large-scale spatial installations. Visitors will be able to navigate their own route around Amorales’s world of fantastical images and stories that explore the field of tension between the individual and society.

The title of this exhibition is in part an allusion to Andy Warhol’s legendary studio of the same name, where an overwhelming image production by him and his entourage took place. Carlos Amorales has, through his own studio practice, positioned himself in the same tradition of artists who exploit the inexhaustible opportunities offered by the free market economy. At the same time, the title is a reference to sinister aspects of late capitalism, such as the alienating effects of contemporary mass media and mass production.

Animation, video, film, drawings, installations, performance, and sound are the tools Amorales uses to investigate new forms of language, meaning, and identity. He even challenges the notion of his own authorship through frequent work with masks, illegible codes, and collages. He operates at the intersection of politics and aesthetics, and many of the works in this exhibition explore the tense relationship between the individual and the masses.

Peep Show, 2019

Internet phenomena can quickly take on a life of their own. An innocent cartoon figure, for example, may be anonymously copied countless times and then be appropriated by the extreme right, so that it ends up being best known as a hate symbol. The original maker has absolutely no influence over this type of transformation. Amorales reasserted control over the process by drawing a character and copying it so often that its meaning was rendered ambivalent. The many repetitions gave rise to a decorative pattern, which in this case takes the form of a light installation.

In this neon installation, the character is trapped in a voyeuristic spectacle in which he is looking at himself in an ambiguous situation that could be pleasurable but also unconfortable.

La Lengua de los Muertos (The Language of the Dead), 2012

In 2006 the Mexican government declared its “war on drugs”. The situation quickly spiraled out of control, and extremely violent murders are still commonplace in the country. Many Mexican artists have attempted to find ways of engaging with the disrupted state of the country. Amorales made a photo novella that incorporates horrific tabloid photographs of the murder victims. The speech bubbles are filled with words written in an illegible alphabet; the senselessness of this violence transcends any attempt to comprehend it.

Vertical Earthquake, 2010

In 1985 a major earthquake struck Mexico. Many Mexicans regarded their government’s response in the aftermath of the earthquake as inadequate, so ordinary citizens stepped up to take responsibility for themselves. This work commemorates the earthquake, which was a decisive moment in the artist’s political and aesthetic development. The lines he has drawn on the walls using a ruler are jagged and erratic, like cracks in buildings. And from this chaos, an organized pattern emerges, just as a new order can arise out of social anarchy.

For many years, Carlos Amorales has been experimenting with his identity as an artist through his Amorales Project. His first act was to combine the surnames of his parents to form the name Amorales (Spanish for “amoral”). He then created his Amorales character, before issuing the Identity Loan Certificate to enable other people to temporarily adopt the identity. Numerous individuals have taken his place, under his name, for discussions, lectures, and even art training. The artist then got involved in Lucha Libre, a type of professional wrestling that is hugely popular in Mexico. Lucha Libre wrestlers wear masks entirely covering their faces, and Amorales had a mask made of his own face, so that anyone who puts it on automatically adopts the Amorales identity. To confuse matters even more, he got the Amorales character to fight another version of himself in Amorales vs. Amorales, transforming this usually fairly straightforward form of mass entertainment into a strange and complex spectacle. This bewildering battle was fought many times, in traditional Mexican wrestling venues as well as museums all over the world. The project saw Amorales intertwining the art world and the world beyond.

El no me mires (The Eye-Me-Not), 2015

An Inuit myth is recounted in an opium smoker’s dream. The story’s central figure is a seal hunter whose father was killed by European whalers after trading goods. A spell has made him invisible to Europeans. The film is steeped in the idea of collage, through which Amorales refers to the costumes and sets designed by the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) and to the theories of the German artist Joseph Beuys (1921–1986). The actors are Philippe Eustachon and Amorales’s own sons.

Apende a joderte (Learn to Fuck Yourself / Learn to Endure), 2018-2019

This work combines obscene texts with illustrations from a book on the body language of medieval iconography. The immersion of the figures in a charged, aggressive environment is a reference to a world where there is no clear distinction between private views and public statements. The Internet is teeming with coarse tirades unleashed by anonymous and known figures. But you’ll also find obscenities in the margins of medieval manuscripts.

Maybe mention that the use of two different languages for writing the obscenities (in this case English and Spanish) in the work, reflects the roughness of an ongoing process of colonization that results in contemporary society.

We’ll See How All Reverberates, 2012

This installation is based on mobiles, the abstract hanging sculptures for which the American artist Alexander Calder (1898–1976) is well-known. Rather than Calder’s colorful floating shapes, however, Amorales has used cymbals, which means the mobile also functions as a percussion instrument. The music produced by the mobile reflects the mood of the visitors.

Orgy of Narcissus, 2019

These colorful panels tell the story of a hero who appears to be trapped in a narcissistic orgy of insatiable clones of himself. At first sight, our hero seems to be rather enjoying himself, but on closer inspection clearly nobody is really enjoying themselves. In fact it looks more like some bizarre nightmare than a pleasurable orgy. In this work Amorales is investigating the contemporary cultural phenomenon of “memes” distributed over the Internet in the form of images or video clips. In this way, their meaning can change very rapidly and become wholly incomprehensible to outsiders. The way in which memes and biological viruses proliferate are very similar, and there are also parallels in the development of gossip and myths: each time the story is retold, it changes a little, and ultimately goes on to lead a life of its own. Subjects such as replication, anonymity, and loss of authorship have long been important subjects in Amorales work, and these subjects have gained powerful new relevance with the rise of memes. The artist chose to make Orgy of Narcissus in that most analogue of media: woven fabric. He made the piece especially for this exhibition, in association with TextielLab in the Dutch city of Tilburg.

Life in the Folds, 2017

Language is made up of not only written and spoken words, but also signs, symbols, sounds, and
patterns. This project sees the artist explore what remains of language when it cannot be understood. At its core, this is a self-designed illegible alphabet of abstract cutouts that form the basis of a new audio-visual language. The arrangement of letters establishes what kind of text we have in front of us, be it a poem, correspondence, or a list. Each letter is also a three-dimensional object in the form of an ocarina, a type of clay flute. Each letter of the illegible alphabet thus produces its own sound, allowing the visual, typographic component to be translated into an auditory component; now we can both see and hear the abstract language. What we can’t yet decipher, however, is the story itself.

Black Cloud, 2007

Stories play an important part in the artist’s work, and he enjoys telling the anecdote of how this work came about: It began with a dream about a room full of moths, an image so powerful that he immediately wanted to materialize it as an artwork. The form of this work adapts to the architecture of each of its host spaces, much as water conforms to the shape of its containing vessel. The moths are active protagonists in this story, not passive bystanders, and they have even gone on to live their own life outside the world of art.

Amsterdam, 2012-2013

Amorales describes his film Amsterdam as a “love story that’s taken a strange twist”. Having co-written the script with Argentinian author Reinaldo Laddaga, he used a photocopier to transform the text into a new and abstract language of symbols, drawings, and photographs of the actors. This unconventional and indecipherable script allowed the director and actors to work in an associative manner. Improvisation was key during filming, which took place in the cellar of the building that houses Amorales’s studio. The written and spoken dialogue is incomprehensible, with the result that the actors’ facial expressions are the primary medium of communication. Amorales frequently incorporates personal experiences in his work. The film is titled after the city in which he trained as an artist, having left Mexico at the age of 19 speaking only his mother tongue. Many of these projects engage with subjects such as language, meaning, and signs—and the inability to understand them.

Psicofonias, 2008

This work transposes visual signals into aural signals. The images come from the Liquid Archive, Amorales’s collection of digital silhouettes, which he uses and reuses. A computer program is used to translate the contours into music: a tone is produced when they touch the bottom edge of the screen. The result is a complex, non-harmonious composition. Psicofonias is a homage to Conlon Nancarrow (1912–1997), the American-Mexican composer who wrote music for the pianola, a self-playing piano with a mechanism that operates the piano action using rolls of perforated card.