Lot Essay
Surely among the most well known of contemporary painters from Central America, Armando Morales has become, over the last decade, intimately familiar to anyone who has kept up with the developments in art in such far-flung centers as Paris, Mexico City, New York and Madrid. His 'classic' subjects, including monumental female nude figures (as in the extraordinary 1985 "Baño II"), jungles, boats on bodies of water or still lifes of ripe tropical or sub-tropical fruits, have made his style into a highly recognizable, highly unique mode of visual expression. Nonetheless, the true connoisseur of the art of Morales will be aware of his subtle metamorphoses that his work has experienced over the years.
During the 1960s, Armando Morales was one of a small group of important Latin American artists who transformed and re-invented the stimuli of abstract painting, altering and changing its language into images that not only entered the international vocabulary of abstraction, but expressed cultural realities of the places where they came from. As in the case of, for example, Bolivian painter Maria Luisa Pacheco whose abstracted forms could be read as synonymous with the towering peaks of the Andes, Morales' strong (often monochromatic) abstractions might have been stimulated by the rugged terrain of his native Nicaragua.
Slowly, beginning in the last years of the 1960s, Morales re-investigated figuration, approaching it from a point of view that bore little relation to the styles of his fellow painters. Morales has always been interested in presenting potentially real situations in a way that does not directly reflect observed experience. His canvases have a definite dream-like quality. By saying this, however, we do not mean to fall into the time-worn stereotype of "magic realism." Morales undoubtedly reflects specifically Nicaraguan situations in many of his works (such as his dramatic representations of Sandino). Yet his jungles, nudes and still lifes are, more than anything else, his intimately personal reveries on themes that have long preoccupied him. Each of these paintings (always monumental in their proportions- or at least carrying with them suggestions of monumentality) expresses a sense of the momentary, a sense of constant change and transformation. Motion is virtually always implied. Nothing is absolute or stable; everything in a Morales painting seems as if it could transmute, metamorphose itself at any moment.
We must be careful to avoid categorizing Morales as a "localist". He employs his characteristic pale colors and delicately worked surfaces (usually accomplished with thousands of tiny scratchings from razor blades) to depict universal themes in many instances. Like Monet, Venice became for him, at a certain moment, an important subject. And indeed, his bathers, so often poised between classical columns or within Greco-Roman arches, seem to be the direct descendants from the sculptures of the Periclean Athens.
Armando Morales is one of those rare artists whose work springs directly from a specific source, corresponding to his intense self-identification with Latin American places and things. At the same time, however, he is compellingly appealing to a wide audience, even those whose principal focus of attention is the gallery world of Manhattan, the Left Bank or the Paseo de la Reforma.
Edward Sullivan
New York, February 1996
During the 1960s, Armando Morales was one of a small group of important Latin American artists who transformed and re-invented the stimuli of abstract painting, altering and changing its language into images that not only entered the international vocabulary of abstraction, but expressed cultural realities of the places where they came from. As in the case of, for example, Bolivian painter Maria Luisa Pacheco whose abstracted forms could be read as synonymous with the towering peaks of the Andes, Morales' strong (often monochromatic) abstractions might have been stimulated by the rugged terrain of his native Nicaragua.
Slowly, beginning in the last years of the 1960s, Morales re-investigated figuration, approaching it from a point of view that bore little relation to the styles of his fellow painters. Morales has always been interested in presenting potentially real situations in a way that does not directly reflect observed experience. His canvases have a definite dream-like quality. By saying this, however, we do not mean to fall into the time-worn stereotype of "magic realism." Morales undoubtedly reflects specifically Nicaraguan situations in many of his works (such as his dramatic representations of Sandino). Yet his jungles, nudes and still lifes are, more than anything else, his intimately personal reveries on themes that have long preoccupied him. Each of these paintings (always monumental in their proportions- or at least carrying with them suggestions of monumentality) expresses a sense of the momentary, a sense of constant change and transformation. Motion is virtually always implied. Nothing is absolute or stable; everything in a Morales painting seems as if it could transmute, metamorphose itself at any moment.
We must be careful to avoid categorizing Morales as a "localist". He employs his characteristic pale colors and delicately worked surfaces (usually accomplished with thousands of tiny scratchings from razor blades) to depict universal themes in many instances. Like Monet, Venice became for him, at a certain moment, an important subject. And indeed, his bathers, so often poised between classical columns or within Greco-Roman arches, seem to be the direct descendants from the sculptures of the Periclean Athens.
Armando Morales is one of those rare artists whose work springs directly from a specific source, corresponding to his intense self-identification with Latin American places and things. At the same time, however, he is compellingly appealing to a wide audience, even those whose principal focus of attention is the gallery world of Manhattan, the Left Bank or the Paseo de la Reforma.
Edward Sullivan
New York, February 1996