Nude, Horse, Incinerator

Armando Morales has often been associated with magical realism, an aesthetic born out of the 1960s Latin American literary “boom” led by authors such as the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez and the Cuban Alejo Carpentier. The fantastic narratives of magical realism are related to Surrealism, but rooted in the specific conditions of Latin American landscape and history. Morales’s dreamy, otherworldly paintings seem to correspond exactly to the tenets of this literary style. The intriguing figures in this work seem to emerge from, and disappear into, the humid landscape without a clear narrative to explain who they are or why there are there. Morales’s remarkable technique involves cutting and pasting together pieces of canvas, and building up many layers of paint that he then scrapes away with a razor blade. The result is a painting that seems to glow from within, the lack of a visible light source further emphasizing the mystery of the fantastical scene.