Special Essay

María Iovino on Delcy Morelos

"Color que soy", by María Iovino

"The soul does not exist without the face that it configures, and this face is taking part of a greater unity in which it is sheltered. The moments of the face exist, concealing and discovering the great throb of life that gives them appearance".

— Georg Simmel


"Color que soy" ("Color that I am") is a new extension of the project about skin and human coloration on which Delcy Morelos has worked intermittently during the last five years.(1). In this work, evidently charged with political and social significance, is implied, as is characteristic of the artist's previous work, a pictorial argument of painting as object, something that has been generally disregarded or simplified in the present-day creative context, loaded as it is with theoretical or discursive concerns. For this reason, a reading of compromise has been underlined in the work of this artist. This arises from the unique circumstances of her experience, training and affiliation. Even though these elements unfold in harmony with the visual vocabulary that she uses, they have been set aside with the purpose of favoring the conflictual interpretations suggested by the work.


“Color that I Am” (detail)

In fact, "Color que soy" was born out of noticing the pictorial significance of a group of people of different races that casually rested with their sweaty uncovered backs after a dance session. The group was comprised of varying shades and radical differences. This offered up an argument about racial distinctions, something that has gained deep meaning in Delcy Morelos' vision. This is particularly relevant because the artist comes from a region bordering the jungle that has been threatened in the last two decades by violence exercised by extremist groups, and in which indigenous people and people of African descent predominate — and are discriminated against by virtue of their race.

Understood from a visual perspective, this contrast in the racial encounter was initially manifested as sketches in watercolor (London, 1998). Consequently, these contrasts have been linked to the work of the artist as investigations that are already proper to her work. The skin or the limits of the object are penetrated for the purpose of investigating an approach to the essential or vital motive of what populates the world, as well as communicating the pulsation of these inhabitants with their unlimited exterior.


“Color that I Am” (Inst. view)

Each one of the 60 paintings that constitute this last exhibition represents fragments of human skin, depicted in colors that range from light to dark, in the spectrum of possibilities that were observed by the artist in her daily life while working on this project. In the illusion of being independently projected geometrical forms, each one of them takes an individual position. The necessary signification of each individual piece with the group to which it belongs negates the visible escape of fluids from the borders of each form.

From this point of view, there exists an evident proximity between this version of "Color que soy" and "Adentro" ("Inside"), a previous project (2000). In the latter Delcy Morelos repeated large scale interconnected forms that suggested an endless flow in which each and all fragments are presented as irregular forms or like an individual/part that is dependent on an unaccountable whole. However, this work developed indeterminacy in a preponderant sense, an idea that was approached from the understanding of the object in all of Delcy Morelo's previous work, in which the form, as the effect of a pictorial reality, is an illusion to be transcended. This attitude responds in an academic sense to a hybrid condition in the artist's training at La Escuela de Bellas Artes de Cartagena (Bolívar, Colombia), due to limited equipment and information. The materials missing from the school's library were primarily those pertaining to the classical periods of the history of art.


“Color that I Am”

Though contemporary art was also weakly represented at the school, the artist developed an interest in the contemporary spirit, especially in the order and serene intimacy that lies in the humble universe of Morandi. In Morandi she found, aside from a minimalism connected to the present theories she had investigated, the abstract in the visible, as well as "the painful admission of the impossibility of grasping the essence of things".

However, if the geometrical sources of Delcy Morelos' work are fundamentally indebted to this complex context — the notion of representation of the visible and its intimate communication with ideas of place and architecture, through her study of Morandi, an essentialist direction, already existent in her vision, is accentuated: to penetrate the formal limit of what is recognizable, to exploit in its "interior" a soul or spirit connected with visible form. This position has characterized her work and any other reading that is imposed upon it as an influence is a projection.


“That which I Am”

This vital principle, associated with a mystical conviction, explains the dissolution of the geometric structure to the point of de-materialization in "Interiores" ("Interiors"1990-1993). The same precept, added to the complicated political/social circumstances in the country, makes the reds of the series "Rojos por naturaleza" ("Red by nature"), "De lo que soy" ("Of what I am"), and "Veces" ("Times" 1999-2001) explode. In these series the presence of a spirit in the object is accentuated, the idea of which has evolved since the artist's childhood. Since the age of 8, Delcy Morelos found distraction from her duties of assisting her parents in a food and textile shop to relate with bottles that she empowered as dolls, or with wood cuts to which she bestowed the strength of nature. This abstraction gave these bodies personality and at the same time connected them as actors of a complex future-to-come, that since those years has become charged with connotations of fear awakened by armed confrontations. Coming from the jungle, this violence quickly invaded the life of Tierra Alta, the artist's place of origin.


“That which I Am” (Inst. view)

If "Color que soy" is linked with that logic, it is undeniable that it is not a subject that advocates painting, but argues for pictorial forces like color, through which meaningful burdens are unloaded, burdens that are rooted in the racial, cultural, and personal histories. This is why it is difficult to agree with the proximity that has been pointed out between the works of Delcy Morelos and the North American artist Byron Kim.


“The Dark Base”

Coincidentally, both artists deal in their paintings with the coloration of human skin, and both do so from the perspective that might be referred to as post-minimalist, using Gerardo Mosquera's(2) explanation of this term. However, in Delcy Morelo's work there's no room for the recognition of objectivist or iconic inheritance, neither from pop art nor from discursive conceptualism, as there is in the work of Byron Kim, evident from his initial conception and moving in an expressive territory demarcated by social discourse.


“It's not a river It's a Mother”

On the contrary, Delcy Morelos' project departs from what seems to be an eminently pictorial objective, which she penetrates, deepening her understanding of the interior of the form. There are no conceptual undertones (those that can be read are a contamination that emerges from an individual position). In such a way, she allows only the pulsation of matter to remain, in an allegory to indeterminacy and eternal transmutation. The concrete object, even though it is still subjected to a pictorial analysis, is hidden behind the essential form, as well as behind the enunciated temporality of what moves and is ethereal, as well as in the circumstantial character of the visible.


“Times”

Similarly, the kinship with abstract lyricism or with the minimal that could be argued to exist in the strong use of seriality and the magnitude of scale in Delcy Morelos' project, don't correspond with the tradition that has marked Byron Kim's work. Delcy Morelo's contact with other artistic expressions of history are amorphous and indirect, and when integrated with her understanding, it is done so in alliance with the maximalist impulse through which she alludes to the revelations of the spirit.


Footnotes

(1) The first version also titled "Color que soy" was exhibited at La Escuela Superior de Artes del Distrito de Bogotá in 1999 and was later selected by Gerardo Mosquera to represent Colombia in the international exhibition "5 Continentes" ("5 Continents") that took place in México City (2000). In this series the skin-cuts of different colors are presented in a frontal way, located towards an extreme of their support, as if they were trying to exit it. The second show dedicated to the subject of human coloration was "La Base Oscura" ("The Dark Base"), presented at the Carlos Alberto González Gallery in Bogotá. In this one, through paintings that referred simultaneously to color theory and the arbitrariness of a social and racial organization, Delcy Morelos, ordered in blocks from lighter to darker, pyramids of skin colors, in which the metaphor is that lightness is associated with superiority.

(2) MOSQUERA GERARDO, "Its Not Only What You See: Perverting Minimalism", Exhibition catalog. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2000.

© María Iovino, 2002


Delcy Morelos Painter, born in Tierra Alta, Colombia. Recent exhibitions include the "VIII Bienal de Arte de Bogotá, 2002" at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, "II Bienal de Buenos Aires" at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2002 and "Color que soy", at the Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional, Bogotá, Colombia, 2002. contact: delcymorelos@yahoo.com

María Iovino Independent curator born in Barranquilla, Colombia. Recent curatorial projects include: "Volverse Aire" an exhibition of Colombian artist Oscar Muñoz's at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogota, 2003, "Color que soy" by Delcy Morelos at the Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional, Bogotá, Colombia, 2002 and "Sin las palabras circundantes" a retrospective of Danilo Dueñas at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, 2001. Writer, teacher and researcher. contact: iovinomaria@yahoo.com

All images are © Delcy Morelos, courtesy of the artist.