Art blooms in Mexico's boomtown; while remaining one of Latin America's most stable financial centers, Monterrey is currently in the process of establishing a lively cultural identity befitting its vibrant economy

Armando Morales

The long-overdue museum survey of works by Morales was curated by critic Christian Viveros-Faune and organized by Betsy Wittenborn Miller and Emilio Steinberger of New York's Robert Miller Gallery in collaboration with MARCO. Subsequent to its Monterrey debut, the show traveled to Miami Art Central and Robert Miller.

A prominent figure in Latin American painting for more than four decades, Morales, now 78, was born in Granada, Nicaragua, where he maintains a home and studio. A one-time diplomat (appointed by the Sandinista government to represent Nicaragua to UNESCO in Paris in the early 1980s), the peripatetic artist, who has lived in Mexico City, Paris, New York and elsewhere, spends part of each year at his home and studio in London, where I visited him last year. As energetic and restless as ever, he is currently in the process of relocating to Barcelona.

After studies at the National Academy of Arts in Managua, Morales attracted considerable attention in the 1950s for abstract canvases featuring organic shapes rendered with crisp lines and muted colors. In 1957, his large painting Spook-Tree (1956) was acquired by New York's Museum of Modern Art, and in the following two years he held successful shows in Lima, Toronto, Houston, Washington, D.C., and New York. His international reputation was further enhanced when he won the Ernst Wolf prize for the best Latin American artist at the 1959 Sao Paulo Bienal.

During the 1960s and '70s, figurative elements began to appear in his work. Eventually, Morales arrived at the imagery for which he is best known today. His deft drawing and bravura painting style using oil and beeswax in countless layers of feverishly applied, small crosshatch brushstrokes result in dreamlike images in which refined figures, objects and landscape elements seem immersed in a brilliant haze. The textural nuances often lend the surfaces the appearance of quilting or embroidery. Morales's imagery consists primarily of nudes, still lifes, allegorical scenes and landscapes in and around his native Granada.

Augmenting the lush sensuality of the images, certain shapes are outlined with narrow white bands carefully trimmed in the colors of the spectrum. These luminous contours, as well as similarly outlined white patches, appear in various areas of the compositions, as if the artist had viewed his subjects through a prism. While all figures, objects and places are ostensibly based in reality, the work has little to do with realism; it is perhaps more akin to Latin America's literary tradition of Magic Realism in works by writers such as Miguel Angel Asturias, Isabelle Allende, Julio Cortazar and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The latter, Morales's friend, contributed a 1992 essay on his painting to the MARCO catalogue.

Morales's penchant for visual narrative is most evident in the mural-sized Annunciation (1999-2001). Here, the crescent moon in the upper left faintly illuminates a phantasmagoric twilight scene. Cubist-style elements in the fractured landscape include an urn, a pitcher and an empty, rust-orange birdcage set beside the kneeling Virgin at center left. Beyond the dark, slightly ominous shadow of the archangel Gabriel looming on the right, a farmer in the far distance goes about his chores, oblivious to the drama unfolding nearby.