At the last Venice Biennale, Delcy Morelos drew us into her labyrinth of fragrant peat deployed between the pillars and girders of the Arsenale, offering us a salutary stroll to the heart of life and the primordial element she has made her favourite means of expression. The Colombian artist returns to New York and Paris with three new immersive installations at the Dia Art Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery.
“To be in contact with the earth and to penetrate it is to be in contact with what constitutes us and nourishes us; the substratum where life develops while it is inhabited by the soul,” explains the Bogotá-based artist, born in 1967. She adds: “In ancestral Andean traditions, the human being is a living earth, I am a body, I am the earth. In the exhibition space, the earth expresses itself; it is the centre and mirror of who we are.” The artist also invites us into a sensory and metaphysical experience, with one of her mazes of earth and hay, enhanced with cinnamon, cloves, coffee and chocolate, entitled “The Place of the Soul” (El Lugar del alma, 2022).
Blending ancestral Andean cosmovision with the aesthetics of minimal art, Delcy Morelos’s large-scale multisensory installations are a kind of “contemporary ritual”, reflecting the artist’s desire to pay homage to Mother Earth as a “living, founding entity, cradle of the cycles of life, death and rebirth.”
Contemporary Ritual
As in El oscuro de abajo (“The Darkness Below”), her new immersive installation designed especially for the basement of the Marian Goodman Gallery in the Marais, where earth mixed with cinnamon and cloves deployed from floor to ceiling draws a kind of cavern, a “sanctuary” within which we are invited to penetrate, and eventually, meditate, the olfactory invitation generating a “meditative feeling of symbiosis with the work”. “I create an experience for the human senses with images, smells, silences, tastes, textures,” explains Delcy Morelos. “I love synaesthesia and am touched by the alchemy that awakens different emotions in each person. I speak to the human body, taking it across a sensory threshold to the dimension of the sacred, of emptiness, of the primordial earth matrix.”
This homage to the earth’s matrix is also expressed in pictorial works on textiles, natural fibres and paper, created over the last two decades, while in New York a mud-covered room evokes the earth’s maternal, “amniotic” moisture, where “death fertilises life”, and a suspended earth monolith invites visitors to stroke it, for “to touch the earth is to be touched by it”.
Delcy Morelos –” El oscuro de abajo”
Marian Goodman Gallery
79 & 66, rue du Temple, Paris 3e
Until December 21, 2023,
mariangoodman.com
“Delcy Morelos: El abrazo
Dia Art Foundation – Dia Chelsea
537 West 22nd Street, New York October 5, 2023 – July 2024
diaart.org