Nuevos Ricos

Amorales’ œuvre includes performance, installation, drawing, animation and video. Back in 1999, the artist began his Liquid Archive. He initially set up this digital picture archive solely as a system for organising his pictorial material but subsequently developed it into an inexhaustible source of pictures and a central part of his oeuvre. His multifaceted work with this archive makes the artistic work not only immediately recognizable as a Carlos Amorales production, but also attests to the visual singularity of his art. In the form of a database the Liquid Archive serves as an artistic tool equipped with an immense pool of motifs and figures. In addition to the letters of the alphabet designed by Amorales in red and black colours, the archive contains a wealth of templates all of which contain nocturnal, dark, frightening aspects. With this figurative inventory, including hybrids, hermaphrodites, wolves, skulls and apes on their knees or creeping along, as well as insects, spiders, moths, birds, arid regions, fruitless trees and aircraft – modern birds – Carlos Amorales creates surreal, mythical, dark fantasy worlds which are analogous to horror films and thrillers – a dark parallel world to everyday existence.

At the end of the 1990s, when “Lucha Libre”, a Mexican variant of wrestling, was particularly popular, Amorales made it into an artistic theme. Under the title Amorales vs. Amorales he staged performances and video works alluding to the theatricality and progression of “Lucha Libre”. The fight between good and evil is a part of the spectacle, as is the interplay of the actors with the audience. Masking is especially important, allowing the “Luchadores”, the actors in the ring, to hide their personal identity and to create a well-defined alter ego via masks and clothing. The investigation of personality as something individual, on the one hand, yet embedded in society on the other, and the constantly recurring battle between good and evil, interested Carlos Amorales as a subject of art.

With the work Flames Maquiladora (2001-2002), which is critical of globalisation and capitalism and which he staged in the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Carlos Amorales drew attention to the negative effects of exploitation in the maquiladora industry in Mexico. This attitude is continued in his project Nuevos Ricos, which is simultaneously a very successful alternative record label. Carlos Amorales founded the label together with the Mexican musician Julian Lede in 2003. By calling it Nuevos Ricos they not only draw attention to the extreme rise (and fall) of the nouveaux riches in Mexico, but put the latter in an ironic and provocative context. The record label Nuevos Ricos adheres to a principle that is unique in the label landscape: combining music with visual art and marketing the two together, with the purchaser not paying for the music but the art. As a label, Nuevos Ricos produces, among others, musicians whose works are not geared to the market and are far removed from the major labels.

Under the title Nuevos Ricos Carlos Amorales will present at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum Nuevos Ricos as an alternative record label in the form of documentation, performances, as an event platform and as a franchise shop. A complex collection of photos, texts, press commentaries, LPs and graphics will shed light on the project from different perspectives, addressing both the theme of franchising and critical franchise piracy. In addition, an abstractly reduced concert hall will be set up in the exhibition rooms, which apart from functioning as an artistic installation and artwork, will also offer space for live performances.

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