MORIS. LA CÁRCEL A CIELO ABIERTO

Human displacements have, up to this day, defined the appearance of the world. It seems that the grand mechanism isn’t the flow itself, but rather how that flow must be disguised, by any possible means, so that the displacements do not disrupt the supposed order, which is precisely nothing more than meticulously organized to generate energy from such inertia. A new form of legal slavery, a path walked in a trance toward a silent death.

Within this colossal structural web, the warp of art is re-signified, within the small framework that Moris has been weaving for a decade in response to this whirlwind of houses and effects, not just as a citizen of underdevelopment but as a participant in the aspirationalism that, within such infrastructure, submits and molds itself, altering its process and production. The work is the result of an intimate survival system, and this exhibition is the assembly of a stage that rises day by day with the hope that it may be the first or the last, depending on the circumstances. In Moris’s work, there are no middle grounds, no mercy, no redemption. His characters, those who exchange shirts, those who traverse country after country and continue to do so until they reach the North American oasis, those who were something yesterday and are now front-page news, cannot be mere images; they are footprints, they are flags.

In the gallery space, these displacements are depicted, moving from south to north, as dictated by the history of cartography that determined the North to always be more powerful and grand. It becomes populated with small cardboard houses as if in an invasion, reaching different borders, flags, and curtains, in whose prints one can glimpse the opposite extremes of the world’s realities. Caricatures that once made us laugh, today their setups bring tears, and a second encyclopedic volume of hunger, whose pages are white sacks disarmed from the Banco de México, in whose building the restrooms are covered with a material resembling gold.

Open sky means there is no cover, that the prison is the territory, that the tunnel – non-existent but that makes us crawl – is traversed day by day in search of the light that isn’t the one we see, that perhaps doesn’t exist, that’s what life itself is about, a grand open theater, a great notebook of ironies, satires, and cynicism. A world that prioritizes deceit and money at any cost needs art to pause and recognize itself in that dark and distorted reflection. Moris encourages us to contemplate ourselves, stripped bare.

Fernando Carabajal

Artists /