Delcy Morelos: El abrazo

When you think of Delcy Morelos’s work, Mark Rothko and Frank Stella are not the first artists who spring to mind. Surprisingly, however, the legacies of these Modernist masters haunt Morelos’s exhibition titled El abrazo at the Dia Art Foundation in ways that can be hard to imagine. At first, I was taken by surprise, almost perturbed, by these considerations as they arose: what to make of these seemingly contradictory — if not profane — juxtapositions? But as I wandered through the space, spending time with Morelos’s monumental pieces, I understood how meaningful this odd triangulation could be. The exhibition consists of two immersive, multi-sensory installations: Cielo terrenal (Earthly Heaven) (2023) and El abrazo (The Embrace) (2023). These works merge surface and volume, collapsing boundaries through monochromatic expanse and accumulations of raw materials. Morelos draws inspiration from the cosmologies of ancestral Andean and Amazonian cultures, as well as her own experiences, to explore the sustaining power of soil in its various forms. In this way, she aims to cultivate moments of connection with the intimate earthliness of elemental forces that can instil a sense of emotional presence and empathy. Delcy MorelosCielo terrenal (Earthly Heaven), installation view, Dia Art Foundation, New York, 2023.Photo: Don Stahl, courtesy of the artist The installation Cielo terrenal (Earthly Heaven) is a monochromatic assemblage that introduces viewers to Morelos’s aesthetic and invites them to look closely and breathe deeply. The use of salvaged building materials recovered from previous exhibitions and held in storage at Dia Beacon subtly gestures to the memory of past artistic statements — relics and ruins that can’t be clearly deciphered but that nonetheless bore witness to cultural unravellings. A post-apocalyptic aura is summoned through the scene’s minimalist appearance. Morelos painted the gallery’s floors and walls with a mixture of earth and aromatic spices, reaching up to the high-water mark left by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. We are simultaneously underwater and on land, in a future-present and in the past. It was the zigzagging and parallel lines, geometrical forms, repetition, and sparse arrangement that in my mind began to echo the linear compositionality of Frank Stella’s most austere and sombre black paintings. Similar to Stella’s work, Morelos’s abstraction retains the connotation of an elemental material that is challenging to comprehend fully because its essence is transfigured and transformed to the point that it no longer resembles itself, even though it continues to communicate something about itself. For instance, in Stella’s paintings, what at first appears to be thin, light lines is revealed, on close inspection, to be raw canvas trapped between block-stripes of black paint. Similarly, Morelos’s Cielo terrenal (Earthly Heaven), as the title suggests, is simultaneously trace and material evidence, transfigured by anthropogenic forces that have stripped reality of its chromatic identities. The work is at once of this earth and an otherworldly vision. Desolate, silent, seemingly dead and yet ripe with potential, the soil that coats the sculptural objects and surfaces comes from the Hudson Valley’s Black Dirt Region — a place around Warwick, NY, that is home to some of the most fertile soil in the world. Delcy MorelosCielo terrenal (Earthly Heaven), installation view, Dia Art Foundation, New York, 2023.Photo: Don Stahl, courtesy of the artist El abrazo (The Embrace) is a breathtaking monolith composed of soil, clay, and aromatic spices. The enormous geometrical body appears to be in a perennial state of levitation. The artist is a sorcerer. The work magically defies gravity, hovering unperturbed. Guests are encouraged to circumnavigate the piece and even touch its earthy composition. Morelos spent years conceptualizing and fabricating it, meticulously inserting every blade of hay by hand, one at a time. In this case, too, the materials that she used metaphorically exceed the perimeter of the gallery walls, intimately embodying anthropogenic ecological realities. Clay and ground coconut husks, recycled from a Manhattan roof garden, are largely responsible for the texture of the work. These materials are mixed together to create a tactile and sensory experience. Morelos believes that too much importance has been given to vision in contemporary art, and she aims to reawaken neglected senses such as smell, through which each visitor can engage in a deeply personal and quasi-spiritual experience. Her invitation to smell instils a decentring of anthropocentric certitude. In the space that her work opens, visitors can experience a sense of productive uncertainty, an awe-inspiring precarity, as Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña would say, that ultimately is the essence of being in this world. The scents of cinnamon, clove, and other spices have the ability to transport and to evoke fleeting memories that cannot necessarily be described or shared. Thus, the work evinces a gentle viscerality that captivates and intrigues. What at first looks like a gigantic pile of dirt is soon revealed to be a temple of the senses, a doorway to different time scales and realities. Delcy MorelosEl abrazo (The Embrace), installation view, Dia Art Foundation, New York, 2023.Photo: Don Stahl, courtesy of the artist It is this room, more specifically — with its low lighting, invitation to focus on an immersive environment that promises transcendental revelation, and conception of a portal — that is haunted by the ghost of Mark Rothko. Both artists have clearly used colour and form to evoke emotional and contemplative responses. In this sense, El abrazo (The Embrace) can be seen as a three-dimensional adaptation of Rothko’s Black on Maroon canvases from 1958. The geometrical neatness and simplicity, the depth and richness of earthiness, and the streaky brushwork have become the roughness of texture. There is something of an Arte Povera sensitivity connecting this Modernist austerity to Morelos’s earthly visions. Her faith in the voice of the material, her ecological concern, and her trust in formal simplicity reach back to the work of the late-1960s Italian movement that forever changed contemporary art. But Morelos’s work is far from derivative, and, despite the debt to a minimalist aesthetic, it has the power to remedy the tragic shortcomings of Modernism. In fact, her vision is what Modernism could have been all along, always, and from the very beginning. Beginning in the 1930s, most Modernist artists often sought to create art that was transcendentally pure and detached from the natural world. Whereas they often favoured industrial and synthetic materials, Morelos incorporates natural and organic substances and embraces a more holistic and ecological approach to art-making. Her work — deeply rooted in the earth, with materials gesturing to very real and tactually present ecological sites — can be seen as a departure from the purely formal, anthropocentric, and abstract concerns of Modernism that led us to climate change and the sixth mass extinction. Her sculptures and installations celebrate Earth as a sacred and nurturing, living force, highlighting its beauty and the connection between humans and the other earthlings that inhabit it. An author and curator specializing in the history and theory of photography, representations of nature, and materiality in art, Giovanni Aloi has edited and authored more than ten books. He is the editor of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture and the University of Minnesota Press series Art after Nature. Delcy Morelos, Giovanni AloiDelcy Morelos, Giovanni AloiDelcy Morelos, Giovanni AloiDelcy Morelos, Giovanni AloiDelcy Morelos, Giovanni Aloi

Delcy Morelos: El abrazo

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