Delcy Morelos and Ettore Spalletti: Esa esquina soy yo

Esa esquina soy yo

24 West 57th Street, New York
13 March - 20 April 2024

Esa esquina soy yo, a joint exhibition by Delcy Morelos and Ettore Spalletti, presents works that span three decades and offers a dialogue between these two artists. The exhibition highlights distinct practices and processes, traversing past and present, bringing to light dual influences and trajectories, from Andean cosmology to explorations of color, geometries and relationship with space. In this exhibition we see their dynamic activation and a sublime transcendence.

In his work, where painting and sculpture merge together, Ettore Spalletti (1940-2019) offers a dialogue between classicism and contemporaneity. In his search for an essential dimension and a new idea of spatiality, there is a constant dialogue with the art of the past and, in particular, with the masters of Italian Renaissance art, from Piero della Francesca to Raffaello. His language eliminates all forms of rhetoric, recovering geometries and archetypal forms according to concepts that clearly distinguish him from Minimal Art.

Fundamental to Spalletti’s poetics are the transformation of materials (alabaster, onyx, marble) and, above all, the definition of a particular painting technique. The painted surfaces, obtained through multiple layers of color impasto repeated over several days at the same time, following the final abrasion, are characterized by the presence of a certain amount of white pigment that, as it breaks, becomes a source of light. The light that comes from within the work intertwines itself with the variations of natural light that add color to color. Far from being absolutely monochrome, Spalletti’s painted surfaces offer a texture which gives breath to the image.

Delcy Morelos' indigenous traditions inform her memories of her homeland and its hierarchies of skin, race, land and violence. Invoking a bodily materiality in her layers of paint poured and slowly applied to textile or fabric supports, the artist lets the paint drip, pool and solidify, creating vast pictorial fields that move away from the picture plane and extend to ceramics, textiles and large-scale immersive installations. Her evocative treatment of color suggests both the body and the earth, revealing what is most sacred to the artist and drawing a connection between the body and violence. Morelos' chromatic exploration of the color red, for example, especially in her early works, implies blood and matrilineal force. Taking cues from Andean ancestral traditions, Morelos favors textiles and fabrics and natural materials such as plant and mineral fibers, earth, clay, and soil. Conceiving of a fictional and primordial cosmos, her experiential artworks are made for the human senses and create “an alchemy that awakens different emotions in each person.”