Air

Carlos Amorales Born 1970, Mexico City, Mexico Lives and works in Mexico City A visitation from another world, Carlos Amorales’s Black Cloud 2007/2018 is a sublime and surreal gathering of 30 000 black paper butterflies and moths, arrested in sculptural formations. Alighting on the walls, ceiling, light fittings and other architectural details of their host institution, the flight of insects is both wondrous for its unexpected arrival in the galleries and foreboding in how it darkens and crowds the space. Moments of concentrated intensity are balanced by smaller, sparser groupings of lepidoptera, creating a teeming mass which rises to envelop the viewer. The installation brings the raw beauty of untamed nature into the museum, taking inspiration from the grand annual migration of the Eastern monarch butterfly ( Danaus plexippus ), which travels up to 4025 kilometres from the United States and Canada (where they breed) down to the mountainous forests of central Mexico (where they hibernate). Although the monarch’s migratory pattern is one of the most highly evolved of any species, it is under threat from climate change. Exemplifying Amorales’s neo-Gothic sensibility, the darkened forms of the butterflies in Black Cloud raise the spectre of their extinction, introducing an elegiac dimension to the sense of awe this simulated migration usually inspires. Referred to by the artist as a ‘plague’, the butterflies’ uncanny beauty suggests a fragile ecosystem profoundly out of whack. Amorales originally conceived Black Cloud as a farewell to his aging grandmother. This personal dedication is reflected in its careful, labour- intensive production, with each laser-cut iteration of the 30 species folded and glued by hand. During the installation process, lines are drawn on walls and ceilings to determine the primary directions of movement; the butterflies and moths are then loosely dispersed along these lines to create an organic swarm. Affixed at different heights and orientations, thousands of winged insects encircle viewers in an experience that fluctuates between evoking a sense of calm and intimating a looming calamity. Carlos Amorales / Black Cloud (detail) 2007/2018 151 Invisible