Live Cinema/Carlos Amorales: Four Animations, Five Drawings, and a Plague

Over the last decade, Carlos Amorales (Mexican, born 1970) has developed a unique visual vocabulary that he has used and reused, both alone and in collaboration with other artists, in mediums ranging from drawing and animation to installation and performance. In his growing and multifaceted body of work, Amorales presents a personal view of the world in which familiar images and objects are capable of invoking collective experiences of anxiety and fear, and in so doing questions and critiques the nature of our daily certainties. Amorales’s fantasy worlds are inhabited by shadows of humans, birds, animals, and insects that coexist in ambiguous but invariably hostile surroundings. In these dark and inhospitable universes, the metamorphosis of humans into animals and of animals into humans occurs naturally, with shapes and forms merging with one another and evolving into threatening hybrids. These surreal visions are heavily influenced by gothic literature and mythological motifs, but are rooted in everyday reality. The result is a fragmented, postapocalyptic vision of life at the beginning of the twenty-first century in which the distinctions between good and evil, normal and abnormal, human and animal are blurred.