DELCY MORELOS, ETTORE SPALLETTI

Esa esquina soy yo will present works that span three decades and offer a dialogue between these twoartists. The exhibition highlights distinct practices and processes, traversing past and present, bringingto light dual influences and trajectories, from Andean cosmology to explorations of color, geometriesand relationship with space. In this exhibition we see their dynamic activation and a sublimetranscendence.

In his work, where painting and sculpture merge together, Ettore Spalletti (1940-2019) offers adialogue between classicism and contemporaneity. In his search for an essential dimension and a newidea of spatiality, there is a constant dialogue with the art of the past and, in particular, with themasters of Italian Renaissance art, from Piero della Francesca to Raphael. His language eliminates allforms of rhetoric, recovering geometries and archetypal forms according to concepts that clearlydistinguish him from Minimal Art.

Fundamental to his poetics are the transformation of materials (alabaster, onyx, marble) and, above all,the definition of a particular painting technique. The painted surfaces, obtained through multiplelayers of color impasto repeated over several days at the same time, following the final abrasion, arecharacterized by the presence of a certain amount of white pigment that, as it breaks, becomes asource of light. The light that comes from within the work intertwines itself with the variations ofnatural light that add color to color. Far from being absolutely monochrome, Spalletti’s paintedsurfaces offer a texture which gives breath to the image.

Color in Spalletti always reveals a depth, just as in the words of Paul Valéry -‘Ce qu’il y a de plusprofond dans l’homme, c’est la peau’- with which the artist titled his solo exhibition at Galerie MarianGoodman in Paris in 2018. Contrary to contemporary trends, Spalletti spent his life in his nativeplaces, loving to call his studio home.

Delcy Morelos’ indigenous traditions inform her memories of her homeland and its hierarchies ofskin, race, land and violence. Invoking a bodily materiality in her layers of paint poured and slowlyapplied to textile or fabric supports, the artist lets the paint drip, pool and solidify, creating vastpictorial fields that move away from the picture plane and extend to ceramics, textiles and large-scaleimmersive installations. Her evocative treatment of colour suggests both the body and the earth,revealing what is most sacred to the artist and drawing a connection between the body and violence.Morelos’ chromatic exploration of the colour red, for example, especially in her early works, impliesblood and matrilineal force. Taking cues from Andean ancestral traditions, Morelos favours textiles andfabrics and natural materials such as plant and mineral fibers, earth, clay, and soil. Conceiving of afictional and primordial cosmos, her experiential artworks are made for the human senses and create ‘an alchemy that awakens different emotions in each person.’

Spalletti’s pink diptych, Carta Rosa, 1998, is the anchor of the North Gallery space, in dialogue withMorelos’ series, Eva, from 2013. The work is made with an impasto of colour painted on the front andback of two slender wooden paper panels that move in response to atmospheric shifts. The colour pinkis, as the artist tells it, the colour of the human skin ‘which never has a fixity of its own but iscontinually transformed through the mood we experience.’ Mobile, 1994, a sculpture painted in adiverse shade of pink, offers an example of Spalletti’s research into the relationship between sculptureand spatiality. Next to these, Morelos’ work, Eva, 2013, extends into three-dimensional space andvolumetric form. A fabric structure, suspended in space, stands across from of a series of works, Eva.1-10, 2013. Objectively geometric, they are made with mineral powders and acrylic, with earth tonesthat recall soil and colour, life and the female body. As Morelos said, the earth contains in its womb thevery cycles of life, death and rebirth, and is a feminine deity.

In the North Gallery room, a series of works by Morelos made with thick layers of acrylic on cottonthread, titled Doble Negacion/Double Negation, 2008, bring the minimalist grid closer to the densetactility of paint droplets, which serve to structure the surfaces of the lattice works. In the center of theroom is Spalletti’s Colonna, portacipria, 2016: a circular form of pink onyx, concealing within it apowder of the same colour, rests on a white marble column, a form dear to Spalletti’s heart, which hasspanned the entire history of art and architecture.

In the South Gallery is Senza titolo, azzurro, 1990, with its three-sided bull frame. Light blue forSpalletti, as the artist put it, is ‘an atmospheric colour, in which we are continually immersed, it is thecolour of the sky [...] ours is a sky of meditation, when you take a walk by the sea towards evening theline of the horizon is no longer visible, the sea joins the sky. You feel that space never ends, there is noimage, but if you try to pierce the blue with a finger, what do you find? You are in contemplativereality. I think of Beato Angelico.’ In Colonna Tagliata, 2016, however, the theme of the columnreturns. The cut side is painted and confirms the continuous crossing between painting and sculpturein his work.

Morelos’ Eva, 2013, acrylic on jute, an installation of the same title made with earth and binder onchipboard, marks Morelos’ decisive shift from the pictorial plane to structures in space, anticipatingher sculptural practice and large-scale experiential and multisensory installations.

At the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, Interwoven, a solo exhibition of Morelos’ work, isscheduled to run from 8 March through 4 August 2024. Delcy Morelos: El Abrazo, on view at DiaChelsea through 20 July 2024, features two immersive earth-based installations, Cielo terrenal(Earthly Sky, 2023) and El abrazo (The Embrace, 2023). A catalogue will be published in conjunctionwith the exhibition.

Press release courtesy Marian Goodman