Carlos Amorales (MX, 1970)
Residency period: September 2025
Carlos Amorales is a Mexican artist based in Mexico City whose work explores the boundaries of language and communication through non-codified means such as sounds, gestures, and symbols. Moving between animation, film, drawing, installation, performance, and sound, he experiments with translation systems in which instruments become characters, letters turn into shapes, and narratives unfold through non-verbal actions. Central to this practice is Liquid Archive, a visual language of abstract forms initiated in 1998 and expanded over more than a decade, alongside other alphabets and systems that reconfigure how texts are read and understood.
Carlos Amorales studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and has held residencies at Atelier Calder in Saché, MAC/VAL in Vitry-sur-Seine, and the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. His work has been widely exhibited internationally, including at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, MUAC in Mexico City, and the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, and featured in biennials such as Venice, Berlin, Shanghai, Sharjah, Havana, and Seoul.
At La Becque, Carlos Amorales revisited Los Amorales, a seminal project he initiated in 1996 that combined photography and performance to question identity through the tradition of Mexican lucha libre. Returning to hundreds of original slides, he re-examined the symbolic role of the mask—at once spectacle, myth, and reality—through the lens of today’s concerns around social media, facial recognition, and artificial intelligence. Thirty years after its creation, Los Amorales will take on a new form, premiering internationally at the 10th edition of Biennale Images Vevey in September 2026.
Hosted in the spaces of La Becque, Carlos Amorales’s residency is initiated by Images Vevey and made possible with the support of Nestlé.
Carlos Amorales, La Becque, 2025, photo Aurélien
Carlos Amorales, ‘Los Amorales’, contact sheet, 1996, courtesy of the artist