Dark Mirror, 2005

The works of Carlos Amorales range from performance to video, drawings to sculpture and installation. They combine mystery, irony and meditations on form, philosophy and psychology to reflect current definitions of our contemporary identity in all its many manifestations.

In his double-video projection Dark Mirror, 2005, one side of the screen shows the pianist José María Serralde performing the piece he composed especially for this work.

The other half contains animation taken from Amorales’s digital drawings: silhouettes of birds and aircraft traversing blood-spattered surfaces in an atmosphere of increasing loss of control.

Media images of the airborne attacks of 11 September are also incorporated, and these, along with the subsequent trauma left lingering in the memory, are lent a dreamlike quality, poised between reality and unreality, consciousness and unconsciousness, resignation and incredulity, like reflections in a mirror. [AV]