Carmengloria Morales at Lennon, Weinberg - Brief Article

Art in America, Jan, 1999 by Lilly Wei

A discreet display of little papers in a corner of the gallery's first room greeted the viewer upon entrance. Each sheet of paper, part of the "diary" of Carmengloria Morales, was folded in half and pinned to a board, like open butterfly wings. The right half was untouched, the left daubed with spots of shining metallic paint. They resembled, in schematic form, Morales's signature abstract diptychs, which consist of a painted panel and a blank one. Registering both the colors selected for the paintings and the sequence of application, the "diary" offers a key to the works and indicates the artist's commitment to process and materials as the essential content of her art.

While this was only her second solo venture in New York--Morales lives in Italy, where she has exhibited since the 1960s--her diptychs and tondos have been shown in a number of group exhibitions here since the `80s. This, however, was the most complete and satisfying presentation of her work to date. It included shifts of scale from the intimate Diptych NY 98-10-2 (each panel 39 1/2 by 19 3/4 inches) to the monumental Diptych NY 95/98-3-2 and B & J India (each panel 103 by 71 inches). The show encompassed paintings on paper and canvas in three distinctive formats: the diptych, the tondo and (a more recent addition to her repertory) the arch. What these three forms share is an origin in antiquity and in religious art; Morales entirely avoids the rectangle, a format that she feels became dominant with the secularization and the commodification of painting in the 17th century.

More worldly provenances are suggested by Morales's gilded, glamorous palette of burnt oranges, rose, golds, bronzes, violets, cool aluminums and cold blacks--colors which strike against one another in an almost audibly percussive way. Her brushwork is as forceful as ever, but it has grown tighter and more abrupt, the strokes placed at right angles to each other or tightly overlaid, with ridges of paint that mark the width of the brush and texture the surface. These densely layered paintings are also layered in reference; for example, the "Entierro" series--studies for a large commission in Italy--is an homage to El Greco's Burial of Count Orgaz. In Morales's hands abstract painting, refreshed by her unassailable confidence in it, becomes supremely, exultantly itself.