.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
“In trying to capture the beauty of the scenery, one only scares it off,” Morales once reflected, musing on memory and realism. “The key is leaving it in peace. Maybe that is where our frustrations lie, in trying to possess things, places, people.”[1] A master of painterly possession, Morales frequently turned his gaze toward his native Nicaragua from parts abroad, conjuring time and again the sensuality of the tropical landscape and its history. Born in Granada, he studied at Managua’s Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes under Rodrigo Peñalba (1908-1979), a foundational figure within modern Nicaraguan art and a proponent of expressionism. Morales found early success with abstract paintings characterized by chromatic sobriety and introspection, gaining influential champions in the Argentine critic Marta Traba and in José Gómez Sicre, chief of the Visual Arts Section at the Pan-American Union. In 1959, he won the Ernst Wolf Prize at the V São Paulo Bienal, awarded to an outstanding Latin American artist, and Thomas Messer chose his painting Landscape (1964) to illustrate the cover of the major exhibition, The Emergent Decade: Latin American Painters and Painting in the 1960s (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1966).
Morales evolved out of lyrical abstraction in the late 1960s as his painting took a more metaphysical turn, exploring the reaches of “magical realism” in the landscapes, still lifes, and female nudes for which he is renowned. Prevented from settling in Nicaragua in the 1970s on account of political upheaval, he worked in Costa Rica and New York before eventually moving to Paris in 1982. Though distanced from his country, Morales plied the tropics from memory, revisiting an often-recounted trip to Manaos, in the heart of the Amazonian rainforest, from 1959. “I am fascinated by this grandeur, this solemnity of the great tropical jungle,” he explained. “Besides its sensuality which embraces all the senses, there is a deep drama, a latent violence that has a strong formal meaning. Everything grows in nature’s struggle to find its way, for plants to encounter the sun, to impose themselves. It is an epic of survival, of luxurious life, and of suffocation, a dense environment, undefined, humid, vaporous, where the abundance of feelings heightens the senses. They look like uninhabited landscapes, but that is the way thickness and density are. You know that the animals are there. You hear them, but you don’t see them; snakes, jaguars, monkeys; birds fly beyond the tree tops. And then, thousands of insects appear at five in the afternoon.”[2}
Epic and, at times, elegiac narratives of the tropics, Morales’ landscapes evoke a flickering and fictive land, a site of memory and of an eternity embedded in the glinting, layered surfaces of his paintings. “Morales’ landscape paintings are perhaps the most commanding reminders of his return to pastness—a penetration as much psychological as physical,” Dore Ashton observed. “His way back, like Alejo Carpentier’s Los Pasos Perdidos, takes him from the concrete experiences of sites in a tropical city to a place far from civilization that lives, still, in mythic time. . . . Morales’ tropical forest, woven into a dense tapestry by the trailing lianes, is as illusory as Carpentier’s. It is a closed universe full of minute reflections that Morales’ brush rhythmically articulates, sometimes flicking a pink light on the grey vine, or a purple shadow on an ocher tree. Greenness prevails, but a greenness that conceals a fictive interior full of color.”[3]
A variation on the wild jungle, Platanal meditates on the human ordering and cultivation of nature and subtly, too, on the contemporary legacy of Central America’s “banana republics.” Planted rows of banana trees stretch into the recesses of the painting, their cast, horizontal shadows patternizing the luminously rich, ocher ground that envelops the gnarled roots of the trees. Morales is justly celebrated for the prismatic brilliance of his color—the intense, even illumination that penetrates the canopy of foliage, the variegated leaves rendered with the fine, cross-hatched strokes of a razor blade that just scratches the surface, refracting the light to an infinitesimal degree. Mesmerizing in its shining stillness, this light suffuses the painting with a sense of suspended temporality both nostalgic, in the sense of Carpentier, and historically self-aware. Like the Brazilian artist Antônio Henrique Amaral’s series of banana paintings (1968-75), Platanal ruminates on the neocolonial abuses of plantation agriculture and its deep-seated human and environmental costs. In alluding to this darker side of the bloom, Morales imbues the landscape with a social gravitas embedded within modern Nicaraguan history, from the Somoza-era repressions to the economic interests of U.S. fruit companies. Yet if the arrival of the banana company once spelled doom for Macondo, the mythic town immortalized by Gabriel García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude, it also set the stage for the enchantments of his fiction. In Platanal, Morales demonstrates the inimitable power of his own, “magical” painting.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1 Armando Morales, quoted in Marie-Pierre Colle, “Armando Morales,” in Latin American Artists in Their Studios (New York: The Vendome Press, 1994), 141.
2 Ibid., 130.
3 Dore Ashton, “… y los sueños son,” Armando Morales: Recent Paintings, November 19-December 19 (New York: Claude Bernard Gallery, 1987), 11-12.
Morales evolved out of lyrical abstraction in the late 1960s as his painting took a more metaphysical turn, exploring the reaches of “magical realism” in the landscapes, still lifes, and female nudes for which he is renowned. Prevented from settling in Nicaragua in the 1970s on account of political upheaval, he worked in Costa Rica and New York before eventually moving to Paris in 1982. Though distanced from his country, Morales plied the tropics from memory, revisiting an often-recounted trip to Manaos, in the heart of the Amazonian rainforest, from 1959. “I am fascinated by this grandeur, this solemnity of the great tropical jungle,” he explained. “Besides its sensuality which embraces all the senses, there is a deep drama, a latent violence that has a strong formal meaning. Everything grows in nature’s struggle to find its way, for plants to encounter the sun, to impose themselves. It is an epic of survival, of luxurious life, and of suffocation, a dense environment, undefined, humid, vaporous, where the abundance of feelings heightens the senses. They look like uninhabited landscapes, but that is the way thickness and density are. You know that the animals are there. You hear them, but you don’t see them; snakes, jaguars, monkeys; birds fly beyond the tree tops. And then, thousands of insects appear at five in the afternoon.”[2}
Epic and, at times, elegiac narratives of the tropics, Morales’ landscapes evoke a flickering and fictive land, a site of memory and of an eternity embedded in the glinting, layered surfaces of his paintings. “Morales’ landscape paintings are perhaps the most commanding reminders of his return to pastness—a penetration as much psychological as physical,” Dore Ashton observed. “His way back, like Alejo Carpentier’s Los Pasos Perdidos, takes him from the concrete experiences of sites in a tropical city to a place far from civilization that lives, still, in mythic time. . . . Morales’ tropical forest, woven into a dense tapestry by the trailing lianes, is as illusory as Carpentier’s. It is a closed universe full of minute reflections that Morales’ brush rhythmically articulates, sometimes flicking a pink light on the grey vine, or a purple shadow on an ocher tree. Greenness prevails, but a greenness that conceals a fictive interior full of color.”[3]
A variation on the wild jungle, Platanal meditates on the human ordering and cultivation of nature and subtly, too, on the contemporary legacy of Central America’s “banana republics.” Planted rows of banana trees stretch into the recesses of the painting, their cast, horizontal shadows patternizing the luminously rich, ocher ground that envelops the gnarled roots of the trees. Morales is justly celebrated for the prismatic brilliance of his color—the intense, even illumination that penetrates the canopy of foliage, the variegated leaves rendered with the fine, cross-hatched strokes of a razor blade that just scratches the surface, refracting the light to an infinitesimal degree. Mesmerizing in its shining stillness, this light suffuses the painting with a sense of suspended temporality both nostalgic, in the sense of Carpentier, and historically self-aware. Like the Brazilian artist Antônio Henrique Amaral’s series of banana paintings (1968-75), Platanal ruminates on the neocolonial abuses of plantation agriculture and its deep-seated human and environmental costs. In alluding to this darker side of the bloom, Morales imbues the landscape with a social gravitas embedded within modern Nicaraguan history, from the Somoza-era repressions to the economic interests of U.S. fruit companies. Yet if the arrival of the banana company once spelled doom for Macondo, the mythic town immortalized by Gabriel García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude, it also set the stage for the enchantments of his fiction. In Platanal, Morales demonstrates the inimitable power of his own, “magical” painting.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1 Armando Morales, quoted in Marie-Pierre Colle, “Armando Morales,” in Latin American Artists in Their Studios (New York: The Vendome Press, 1994), 141.
2 Ibid., 130.
3 Dore Ashton, “… y los sueños son,” Armando Morales: Recent Paintings, November 19-December 19 (New York: Claude Bernard Gallery, 1987), 11-12.