The gallery is pleased to present The devil holds your eyelids, the second solo exhibition at the gallery by Mexico City based artist, Moris.
In The devil holds your eyelids, Moris appropriates imagery from early Renaissance etchings with current images and tapestries, proposing that evil presents itself in a continuum and is ongoing. He dares us to look more closely. About the exhibition’s title, Moris says, “Evil always comes from afar, from that place we idealize, but do not know and we dare not acknowledge as part of our universe.”
In, The sleet, one of the works within the series, Tied to a stone, Moris depicts a storm taken from Doré’s etchings illustrating the ballad of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” This muted black and white work reflects man’s helplessness before the magnificence of the natural power of the ocean. Moris says, “One has to almost die by drowning to know how much air fits in the lungs.” The appropriated and recontextualized waves have been thermally transferred onto discarded cloth bags from Banco de México, used for legal tender. They bear the marks of their purpose, such as handwritten inscriptions by the workers of the bank and dirt from the coins and bills that they once captured. For Moris, they also serve as a reminder of the event in Mexican history dubbed “La Noche Triste,” or “The Sad Night,” when the Spaniards preferred to drown in the rivers surrounding Tenochtitlan rather than relinquish the indigenous gold.
In the series Under the lion’s whiskers, Moris assumes the role of alchemist, combining and collaging images from different eras—from newspapers, photos, engravings of The Dance of Death, by the artist Hans Holbein—transferring them onto canvas, the details emerging through an additional layer of spray enamels, colored tapes and cement. The result is a delicately balanced and faceless chaos echoing the complexities of shifting moralities.
Anchoring the exhibition, both visually and metaphorically, are two large-scale assemblages, The silence after the tragedy and Spit to death. Each one is weighted at the bottom by objects with symbolic and narrative dimension, begging gravity—the same indifferent force that suffocates the viewer in Tied to a stone, or judges them in Under the lion's whiskers—to reveal imagery that, perhaps not so paradoxically, both compel and repel us simultaneously.
Moris writes, “This exhibition is the history of image and thus, it is the history of those who observe and wander around this space as well. It is a sort of mirror maze, because there is certainly nothing more uncomfortable than eating while looking at oneself in a mirror, and this is a feast. Printed, mutilated bodies, suspended, without a face, tempests that break the sailor’s reason; timeless macabre dances which are clumped in a single illegible reality, which is nonetheless aesthetic and perversely attractive.”
Moris’ work is part of many important public collections worldwide, such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Los Angeles; La Colección Jumex, Mexico City; the Perez Museum, Miami; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Major exhibitions include the 9th Havana Biennale, Havana, Cuba and the 30th São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo, Brazil in 2012.
