Carlos Amorales

Carlos Amorales was born in Mexico City in 1970, where he currently lives and works.

Carlos Amorales has developed a visual alphabet of vectors that recurs throughout his drawings, sculptures, and installations. This archive of images assembles silhouettes based on photographs from magazines and newspapers, ranging from scenes of everyday life to urban violence and ecological catastrophe. Their juxtaposition creates an unsettling world, heightened by their black silhouettes and flat, stylized forms. Drawing on the fantastic and the aesthetics of nineteenth-century horror, Amorales generates a palpable sense of tension and unease despite the lack of psychological expression in his figures.

During his residency at Atelier Calder, he created a series of wrought-iron sculptures depicting fantastical animals. He also designed a suspended, participatory work consisting of cymbals attached to the ends of metal rods, which the public was invited to strike. It became a performance in which sound, movement, and interaction transformed the space. Amorales explored the tension between participants and observers, pushing the work toward unpredictable situations that at times approached chaos.