At the last Venice Biennale, Delcy Morelos led us into her fragrant peat maze, unfurled between the pillars and beams of the Arsenale, offering a restorative stroll into the heart of life and the primordial element that has become her preferred means of expression. The Colombian artist returns to New York and Paris with three new immersive installations at the Dia Art Foundation and the Marian Goodman Gallery.
“To be in contact with the earth and to penetrate it is to be in contact with that which constitutes and nourishes us; the substrate where life develops while it is inhabited by the soul,” explains the artist, born in 1967 and based in Bogotá. She adds, “In ancestral Andean traditions, the human being is living earth; I am a body, I am the earth. In the exhibition space, the earth expresses itself; it is the center and the mirror of what we are.” The artist also invites us to a sensory and metaphysical experience, one of whose labyrinths of earth and hay, enhanced with cinnamon, cloves, coffee, and chocolate, is entitled “The Place of the Soul” (El Lugar del alma, 2022).
Blending the ancestral Andean worldview with the aesthetics of minimal art, Delcy Morelos' large multisensory installations create a kind of "contemporary ritual" and testify to the desire of the artist of indigenous origins to pay homage to Mother Earth considered as a "living and foundational entity, cradle of the cycles of life, death and rebirth".
© Delcy Morelos / Photo: Don Stahl
CONTEMPORARY RITUAL
Thus in El oscuro de abajo (“ The darkness below "), her new immersive installation designed specifically for the basement of the Marian Goodman gallery in the Marais, where earth mixed with cinnamon and cloves, spread from floor to ceiling, creates a kind of cavern, a "sanctuary" into which we are invited to enter, and perhaps meditate, the olfactory invitation generating a " a meditative feeling of symbiosis with the work ". " I create an experience for the human senses using images, smells, silences, tastes, and textures. “I love synesthesia and I am touched by the alchemy that awakens different emotions in each person,” explains Delcy Morelos. “I speak to the human body, I lead it through a sensory threshold towards the dimension of the sacred, of the void, of the primordial earthly matrix.”
A tribute to the maternal earth also expressed in pictorial works on textile, natural fiber and paper, created over the last two decades, while in New York a room lined with mud evokes the maternal, "amniotic" moisture of the earth where "death fertilizes life", and a suspended earth monolith invites visitors to caress it because "to touch the earth is to be touched by it".
“DELCY MORELOS – EL OSCURO DE ABAJO”
MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY
79 AND 66, RUE DU TEMPLE, PARIS 3RD
UNTIL DECEMBER 21, 2023
MARIANGOODMAN.COM
“DELCY MORELOS: EL ABRAZO”
DIA ART FOUNDATION – DIA CHELSEA
537 WEST 22ND STREET, NEW YORK
FROM OCTOBER 5, 2023 TO JULY 2024
DIAART.ORG
