Armando Morales - Latin America New York Tuesday, November 15, 2011 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Robert Miller Gallery, New York
    Private Collection, Miami

  • Catalogue Essay

    Armando Morales is considered one of the most prominent master painters of Latin America, and is celebrated for his sensual texture and diversity of form. Morales has created masterpieces within virtually any genre, always portraying his subject with uniquely expressive form, vigor, and style. Indeed, throughout his career he has experimented with countless technical and stylistic approaches to painting, digging into his intellectual arsenal for influences that range from the stark naturalism of history painting to the thick brushwork of early Cubist nudes.

    The present lot features Morales’ tremendously ambitious foray into the genre of landscape is powered by his anarchic treatment of the scene. Effectively communicating the indomitability of nature, Morales confronts his viewers with cavernous patches of darkness and dense clouds of green. There is virtually no attempt at centrality or compositional balance. Illusion begins to break down, and the long, thin tree trunks rapidly become nonfigurative lines, while their crowning branches turn into intense celebrations of brushwork. His use of beeswax adds a profoundly modern reference to the importance of material to meaning, as he represents nature on one of the purest products of it.

    In Tropical Rain forest, Biological Reserve Indio Maíz, Nicaragua, Morales offers a master class in the handling of paint, brush, and texture. The lush, intricate detailing is overwhelming, and the interplay between the texture of the beeswax and each brushstroke results in an all-encompassing and wonderfully disorienting composition. The seemingly impenetrable foliage becomes increasingly accessible as one peers through it, each form bleeds down to delicate shades of blue, brown, purple and yellow. The possibilities for the eye are endless. Through the elaborate enormity of Morales’ vision, we become lost travelers ardently searching for a trail.

NICARAGUAN

27

Tropical Rain Forest, Biological Reserve Indio Maíz, Nicaragua

2003
Oil on canvas with beeswax.
51 1/8 x 76 3/4 in. (129.9 x 194.9 cm).
Signed and dated "Morales / 2003" lower right.

Estimate
$300,000 - 500,000 

Latin America

14 & 15 November 2011
New York