Exhibitions
Black cloud as the choreography of multiplicity in the work of Carlos Amorales
An immersive installation of paper butterflies that transforms architecture into a living landscape between order and chaos.
At the Casa de México Foundation in Spain, the installation Black Cloud by Mexican artist Carlos Amorales is on display until September 13 as one of his most striking and recognizable works in international contemporary art. The piece transforms the exhibition space into an immersive environment where the visitor's perception is completely altered by the accumulation, repetition, and suggestion of constant movement.
The installation comprises tens of thousands of butterflies and moths cut from black paper—approximately 25,000 to 30,000 pieces—belonging to some 300 different species. Each element has been precisely produced and placed by hand, covering walls, ceilings, and corners to create a sense of organic expansion, as if the building itself had been invaded by a natural phenomenon in full bloom.
The result is a visual experience that oscillates between the hypnotic and the unsettling. Although the composition evokes the idea of a moving plague, its arrangement follows a carefully structured system based on lines that expand and multiply. This tension between the chaotic and the controlled is one of the core concepts of the work.
First presented in 2007 and exhibited since then in various international institutions, Black Cloud has become a key piece in the artist's career. Its variable scale—which can reach up to 30,000 individual figures—reinforces the idea of collectivity and accumulation as a visual language, where repetition becomes a form of narrative.
Carlos Amorales is known for developing a visual language based on systems of signs, silhouettes, and patterns that are repeated and transformed. His practice encompasses disciplines such as animation, drawing, collage, installation, and performance, articulated through his own visual archives—such as his “liquid archive”—which he constantly reorganizes.
This method allows him to question fundamental notions such as identity, authorship, and the stability of the image. His work also recurrently explores themes such as symbolic violence, chaos, and the cultural construction of meaning, always under a tension between conceptual rigor and visual power.
In the case of Black Cloud, this research translates into an experience where beauty coexists with discomfort. The figures, delicate in their individuality but overwhelming as a whole, generate an ambiguous effect that oscillates between seduction and repulsion. The viewer is thus confronted with a space that is not only observed but inhabited, and which invites a reconsideration of preconceived ideas about beauty, nature, and artifice.
You may be
interested
...
