Whilst in London Morales began working on large paintings depicting a stout, arrow-like form, or emblem. This shape tended to encroach the painting from its right-hand edge. It was built with three or four bands of colour, and would be placed on a single field of a related colour, such as a bright red or ochre. This emblem seems diagrammatic, but it is also ambiguous. Through its position, which always bisects the painting into two halves, this arrow-like encroachment seems to connect to the idea of horizon-lines, or of movement itself, akin perhaps to the go-faster stripes on a custom car. For Morales, this form resonated less with pop-graphic insignia than with a way to express the experience of vision itself. The painting’s bands of colour seem to offer a self-reflexive meditation on the act of looking—as one’s eyes trace along their length, just as one might look across, or pan, a wide horizon. Morales sees her interest in this experience of vision as partly drawn from her earliest memories of the vastness of the Chilean landscape, which she encountered as a child, before her family’s move to Italy when she was ten. She also connects this experience with her sympathy for Spanish landscapes, which due to their larger scale are quite unlike those in her adopted Italy and are more evocative of her idea and understanding of landscape from her childhood.
If the phenomenon of vision is embodied in Morales’s arrow-like emblem, so too was another corporeal vestige—that of her body, arm, and left-handedness. The fact that in these paintings her form has its apex on the right-hand side of the canvas, and seems to continue beyond the opposite left-hand edge, corresponds at least initially, to the way her arm and hand would most naturally draw each shape. In her London paintings Morales can be seen to have started to focus on ideas redolent with both the acts of vision, and movement—ideas which have been on-going concerns for her throughout her whole career.
In late 1969 when Morales returned to her studio on via Montoro in Rome, she placed one equally sized canvas on top of the other, with a small gap between each one. Her ‘visual arrow’ acted as a bond in the composition, linking the two canvases. In Dittico R70-5-7 (1970), one of the last paintings in this series, Morales’s emblem has now been split, and both canvases contain elements of it. The tapered bands of colour on each canvas are different, and physically and visually they have been bisected by the pristine white of the gallery wall on which the painting is hung. On both the top and the bottom canvas, there is also a sliver of the raw unpainted linen. This bare canvas acts like an unpainted pause in the composition, and together with the visible splitting, speaks of the physical and material act of making.
1
Carmengloria Morales: Rome, London, Milan, New York, Sermugnano, 2024, installation view at the BSR
2
Diptych R70-5-7, 1970, (70 x 2) x140, acrylic on canvas
3
Diptych R70-7-8, 1970, (70 x 2) x140, acrylic on canvas
4
6810, 1968, 47 x 27,5 cm, tempera and acrylic on paper, framed
5
6814, 1968, 47 x 27,5 cm, tempera and acrylic on paper, framed
