Skeleton Images - Azar Compositions Duo (Lines and Solid)

Based in Mexico City, Carlos Amorales is a multidisciplinary artist whose work ranges from performance and social practice to animation and print. Chance operations and collaboration are central to his practice, which synthesizes Mexican and European traditions to explore dreams, psychology, and the supernatural. In 1999 Amorales began building his “Liquid Archive”– a collection of over 1,500 silhouettes, which he has continued to mine and remix for various projects. To create the diptych “Skeleton Images – Azar Composition Duo,” Amorales repeated a composition printed from Plexiglas silhouettes drawn from the Liquid Archive. He arranged the shapes by chance (azar means chance in Spanish) by shaking the Plexiglas forms in a box and recording the positions in which they landed. He etched patterns of radiating lines into one side of the Plexiglas cutouts and printed them with either red or blue ink. One sheet of the diptych features only the etched lines, printed using the intaglio printing method (in which the ink was worked into the recessed lines and the flat surface of the Plexiglas was wiped clean). On the other sheet of the diptych, intaglio and relief printing methods were used simultaneously: the lines again filled with ink (i.e. intaglio printing) and the flat surface inked to print a solid field of tone (i.e. relief printing). Where the cutouts overlay one another, the etched lines of the different pieces intersect and produce new patterns, and additional, darker tones appear where solid swaths of red and blue inks overlap. The prints thus exemplify Amorales’ mode of activating the latent, uncanny potential in ordinary images through variation, recombination, and replication.