Later, while moving a similar, large two-panel painting in her studio, Morales stumbled upon a format that has proved hugely significant for her career, and to her understanding of painting as a visual and conceptual medium. By momentarily placing two equally sized canvases vertically next to each other, rather than having one panel horizontally on top of the other, Morales understood how an idea of time and potentiality could enter her work, how one could conceptualize a painting as whole—by considering first one canvas, and then the next.
Dittico R71-12-13 (1971) is one of Morales’s signature diptychs in this format. Two equally sized canvases have been placed next to each other. The right-hand canvas is completely empty—and is raw canvas. The left-hand one is painted and is full. Although the painted canvas contains no recognizable forms it does hold content—which is centered around the conceptualization of the artist’s touch, and on the painting’s making. Although dark, this canvas contains colours— a blue, a pink, a green—each painted in thin coats, one on top of the other, to create a rich light-absorbing surface. The individual colours are occasionally visible and reveal themselves at the painting’s edges. The surface holds an indexical trace of the movement of Morales’s body and left hand, with the density of colour celebrating the nuances of perception and vision, and the physical materiality of the act of painting. When encountering the work as a whole, and reading it from left to right, one seemingly moves from fullness to emptiness, from the present to the past, or from the actual to the abstract. From the concrete record of a painted activity to a pristine vacancy that speaks of the act of looking, and of potential. As Morales put it, “you are looking at a painting knowing you are looking at a painting. Being sent backwards, where the painted part catches you whilst the unpainted part brings you back to this awareness of the fact that it is painting that you are looking at.”
All of Morales’s subsequent diptychs follow this format. The two canvases are vertically aligned, with the left-hand one painted, whilst the one on the right-hand side is left intentionally blank. During the development of the diptychs in the 1970s, Morales tested new ways in which to paint the left-hand canvas. For example, she painted a left-hand canvas with her left-hand, and a diptych that, although unified, could be read from the left to right—from activity to otherness.
1
Carmengloria Morales: Rome, London, Milan, New York, Sermugnano, 2024, installation view at the BSR
2
Diptych R71-12-13, 1971, (140 X 2) x 140 cm, acrylic on canvas and empty canvas
