As can be seen in Dittico R73-6-1 (1973) or Dittico R75-11-1 (1975), each permutation of Morales’s diptychs during this period is different. Each work explores a specific process, with the canvas treated in a unique manner. In these works, and in what could be seen as a constrained format, and with colour increasingly expunged, Morales is hugely experimental. Some paintings are made in acrylic paint, others in oil paint and wax. Some of the diptychs are painted by Morales with her fingers, others with a specific type of brush, or they are constructed and drawn upon in grey graphite. Each work, therefore, is marked or painted differently, but in a manner that shows no other form but that of the method of marking or painting. The application of the paint, then, is everything. It is of itself. It is unified. As such, all the diptychs illustrate, through their making, the fundamental aspects of painting—the materiality of the medium, and the temporal and autographic presence of the artist herself.
Through this focus on process, and the artist’s own subjectivity, Morales’s diptychs radically positioned her painting in a new terrain. These are paintings that are not aligned to what Morales saw as an ‘old-fashioned’ type of pictorial classicism, a trait that the artist sought to shake off in London, nor the Greenbergian formalism that she encountered there and was arguably drawn to, and which many in Caro’s London circle still promulgated. Morales’s diptychs offer something new—a pictorial clarity and indeed severity, which questioned the fundamental characteristics of painting as a medium and making process. Although in dialogue with other Italian paintings, such as those by Giorgio Griffa (b.1936), who like Morales is associated with the Italian Pittura Analitica movement, Morales’s works are very different in idiom. They must be understood outside of a solely Italian context. They are more stoical, less celebratory and calligraphic than Griffa’s canvases, and have a toughness that is more closely aligned to those artists in France associated with the Supports/Surfaces movement who were interested in deconstructing the physical, historical and conceptual frameworks around the act of painting. Alternatively, they connect to paintings by Morales’s friend Martin Barré (1924–1993), who similarly isolated and worked with the individual components of a painting—the gesture, mark, and frame. For Supports/Surfaces such an undertaking was imbued with strong social and political content, and although Morales’s position is far less overt, more Beckettian and wonderfully unswerving, the fact that as a woman she was using painting—and abstraction—in such a manner cannot be ignored. Morales’s paintings have an attitude that understands and contests prevalent ideas associated with painting, such as much of its history—and subsequently language—being gendered. Two of her diptychs were included in documenta 6 (1977) where they were shown alongside the gestural abstractions of de Kooning (1904-1977), as well as works by Frank Stella (1936-2024). Morales’s paintings can be seen to agitate, and rub-against the lyricism and formalism of such positions, as they seek to expand such a language of painting.
1
Diptych R73-6-1, 1973, (40 x 2) x 200 cm, graphite and vinyl on canvas and empty canvas
2
Diptych R75-11-1, 1975, (50 x 2) x 200 cm, enamel and oil on empty canvas
