Drifting Star
Carlos Amorales
Starting in 1998, and for nearly two decades thereafter, Amorales developed most of his work through a database of vector drawings, which offered him a vocabulary both constrained in its elements and infinite in its possible variations and applications. The installation Drifting Star is especially illustrative of the different translation and production processes that emerged from this project.
The hundreds of black Plexiglass pieces hanging in the exhibition hall bring the first scene of his video Dark Mirror (2004) into the viewer’s space. This video, in turn, emerged from two acts of authorial transfer: the delegation of the artist’s film, which is about an animator who made freewheeling use of the archive’s vector images, and a pianist specialized in improvising incidental music for cinema. In this sense, Drifting Star should be experienced as a third- or fourth-generation appropriation, which nonetheless returns like a visual boomerang to an essential scene in Amorales’s work on the twenty-first century: the cascades of rubble and glass forming sculptural nebulae in the 2001 attack on the Twin Towers, in New York.
CARLOS AMORALES (1970)
Drifting Star, 2010
Installation. 750 plexiglass hanging elements
Acquisition through the SHCP Pago en Especie program, 2015
