carlos amorales: anteparaíso

Carlos Amorales has developed a multidisciplinary practice that draws on analog and digital techniques to construct fictional worlds through which he examines the tensions and contradictions of contemporary life. Working across drawing, animation, installation, and graphic experimentation, Amorales creates visual narratives that explore systems of power, processes of social and cultural transformation, and the shifting boundaries between human imagination and technological production. In Anteparaíso, his fourth solo exhibition with kurimanzutto and third at the gallery in Mexico City, the artist introduces a cast of imaginary beings whose interactions unfold through sequences of drawings and animation. The exhibition takes its title from the 1982 poetry collection Anteparaíso by Chilean poet Raúl Zurita, suggesting a place or condition that precedes paradise. In the work of Amorales, this fictional universe holds in tension both the promise of salvation associated with artificial intelligence and the threat of an apocalypse brought about by the same technology.

The exhibition opens with Anteparaíso, a monumental installation inspired by H. G. Wells's science-fiction novel The War of the Worlds (1898). Written at the height of European imperial expansion, the novel reverses the logic of colonial conquest by imagining Britain, itself an imperial power, subjected to an invasion by technologically superior Martians. Amorales extends and adapts this premise through a series of frottages depicting encounters between two distinct groups of beings. One consists of human-plant hybrids engaged in agricultural labor; the other, of extraterrestrial creatures who dominate and exploit them as livestock. Yet the world of Anteparaíso is not defined by oppression alone. Across its vividly colored scenes, colonizers and colonized also gather, dance, celebrate, and mate, giving rise to new forms of life. These scenes complicate the distinction between opposing groups, evoking the processes of mixing, exchange, and resistance that have shaped societies throughout history, particularly in the context of colonialism.

The hybrid nature of these beings is reflected in the techniques used to depict them. Amorales begins by using artificial intelligence to generate graphic patterns, which he cuts out to create templates. He places these beneath sheets of paper and rubs over them with wax crayons designed for children, used in Waldorf education and inspired by Goethe’s theory of color. Through this frottage technique, he transforms digitally generated imagery into handmade drawings. This shift from digital to physical form continues an investigation central to his practice: the translation of signs and visual elements across different systems of representation. The resulting compositions bring together algorithmic processes and a tactile, repetitive technique associated with drawing and early education. Through these successive stages, distinctions between the mechanical and the handmade, the artificial and the organic become as fluid as those separating the creatures depicted.

A second body of work, ThisPersonDoesNotExist, approaches the relationship between artificial intelligence and human creativity from a different perspective. Presented along a 360-degree cyclorama, the series consists of drawings of fantastical faces that surround the viewer. Its title refers to the website This Person Does Not Exist, which uses artificial intelligence to generate photorealistic portraits of people who have never existed, drawing on patterns identified in vast collections of facial images. Similar datasets are also used to train facial recognition technologies, which are closely linked to today's systems of surveillance and control. In contrast to these algorithmically generated portraits, Amorales's characters emerge entirely from his imagination and are rendered by hand using the same wax crayons employed in Anteparaíso. Their exaggerated features and expressive forms depart from photographic realism, yet suggest complex emotional states and distinct personalities. By conjuring a dialogue between these different approaches to image creation, the artist considers how representations of nonexistent beings can emerge from radically different methods: the automated recombination of visual information and the creative act of drawing.

Arranged in a continuous line at eye level, the drawings in ThisPersonDoesNotExist recall the panopticon, the architectural model of surveillance conceived by Jeremy Bentham in 1791 and later examined by Michel Foucault as a mechanism of disciplinary power. Rather than reproducing its structure, Amorales reverses its underlying logic: a multitude of faces appears to watch the viewer from every direction. The spectator, initially positioned as the one who looks, becomes the subject of a collective gaze. This reversal creates a paradoxical encounter in which the sensation of being watched arises not from a technological surveillance system, but from figures invented and drawn by the artist––faces that seem to observe us, even though the beings they portray do not exist.

In the gallery's Project Room, Paraíso returns to the imagery of the opening installation through an animated triptych derived from its frottages. Using an AI animation program, Amorales introduces subtle movements into the scenes through a prompt that calls for minimal drama and a choreography of agricultural labor inspired by Butoh dance. The triptych format evokes Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights (ca. 1490–1500), although the artist departs from the moral and religious framework of Bosch's painting. The animation shifts the focus from visions of paradise and damnation to figures whose gestures blur the distinction between agricultural labor and ritual dance, evoking the relationship between harvesting traditions and pagan celebrations. Accompanied by an ambient musical composition by Daniela Huerta, the work turns the static compositions of Anteparaíso into a slowly unfolding choreography shaped as much by exploitation and violence as by desire and the possibility of coexistence.

Across the exhibition, Amorales brings together AI-generated figures, handmade drawing, and animation, extending his longstanding exploration of how images and systems of communication are constructed and transformed. Together, Anteparaíso, ThisPersonDoesNotExist, and Paraíso explore tensions that permeate contemporary life, from unequal relationships of power to the increasingly uncertain distinctions between observing and being observed and between the real and the artificial. In this context, paradise remains an unresolved proposition, recalling our own world, whose future is still being imagined.