THE BEGINNING AND THE LIGHT
Ernesto Morales (Italy)
Ernesto Morales’s artistic practice – profoundly rooted in literature, philosophy, and science – engages with the themes of transformation and change in the natural world. His fascination lies in the nuances of nature’s visual perception by the human eye, particularly under shifting light.
In recent years, Morales has concentrated his creative practice on perception of light. His work explores how space, in dialogue with the viewer’s movement and depending on his or her position and perspective, can make the artwork appear luminous and bright or quietly opaque, with the effect entirely contingent on the painting’s interaction with the ambient light.
For Morales, the concepts of beginning and light transcend the purely metaphysical realm. He knows their impact is literal and physical, shaping the viewer’s visual perception whilst retaining all the connotations of the sacred, enigmatic, and profound. Thus, both these concepts remain potent symbols of awakening and triumph, a source of strength that fuels growth, renewal, betterment, and new creation.
A striking and distinctive aspect of Morales’s creative output lies in the semiotics of his treatment of clouds. With his artistic touch, clouds become carriers of light and heralds of a new beginning. Curator Nicola Davide Angerame invites us to interpret Morales’s work in terms of a metaphysics of clouds shown through pictorial transcription and directed at the concentration, within a visual field, of a practice whose sense floods the furrow of representation to occupy the immense and boundless plain of a further landscape: that of the spirit, of the mind, of the psyche and of that truth of which everything is part. Seen through this lens, clouds represent the essence of the universe’s origins, absorbing and reflecting light in an eternal cycle: spilling into lakes, rivers, and seas before returning, rising up again, reflected in the oceanic mirror, to form new clouds and thereby signal a perpetual rebirth and an interminable new beginning.
Morales’s painting practice is distinguished by his use of natural pigments, allowing him to capture the subtleties of light as it interacts with the viewer’s gaze while they are moving through the exhibition space, dynamically engaged in their own reading of the artworks on display.
Curator Māris Čačka
Ernesto Morales, born in 1974 in Montevideo, Uruguay, began his journey as an artist in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he lived until 2006 before relocating to Europe. After a period in Paris, he set up his studio in Italy – initially in Rome and, since 2011, in Turin. Over the past two decades, Morales’s artistic explorations have resulted in multiple exhibitions across museums and galleries in Europe, the Americas, and Southeast Asia. Between 2009 and 2024, he institutionally represented Italy, Argentina, and Uruguay through a series of major solo exhibitions. In 2019, his retrospective, “Mindscapes”, was held at the Consulate General of the Argentine Republic in New York. In 2023, Morales created the exhibition “Come sia luce” in dialogue with the work of Lucio Fontana at La Crescentina. From November 2024 to February 2025, his latest exhibition, “The Beginning and the Light”, is on show at the Rothko Museum in Latvia.
Exhibition duration: 29 November 2024 – 23 February 2025
Photo: Ernesto Morales, Luce IV, 100 x150 cm, 2023
