AIR: Carlos Amorales

Carlos Amorales
Mexico b.1970
Black Cloud 2007/2018
30 000 black laser-cut and handfolded paper butterflies (30 different butterfly and moth species in five sizes with a wave wing pattern), ed. 1/3 (+ 1 A.P.)
Dimensions variable
Purchased 2022 with funds from Tim Fairfax AC through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation

This surreal gathering of black paper butterflies and moths, Black Cloud 2007/2018, brings the raw beauty of nature into the museum, in a sight which is both wondrous and foreboding. Artist Carlos Amorales describes the insects as a ‘plague’, which rises to envelop the viewer.

An installation view of a gallery space where the white walls are covered in black paper butterflies.

Carlos Amorales’s Black Cloud 2007/2018, installed at GOMA for ‘Air’, 2022–23 / © Carlos Amorales / Photographs: C Callistemon, M Campbell and J Ruckli, QAGOMA

The installation is partly inspired by the grand annual migration of the Eastern monarch butterfly from North America, where the species breeds, down to the forests of central Mexico, where they hibernate — a migration currently under serious threat from climate change. The butterflies’ uncanny beauty raises the spectre of this extinction, evoking a fragile ecosystem profoundly out of balance. In Australia the work evokes the sight of thousands of native bogong moths descending on Parliament House, Canberra, during their spring migration south, but whose numbers are now in catastrophic decline.

Amorales invites us to confront the escalating devastation of invertebrate populations due to climate change. The butterflies’ blackened wings are a dire portent of things to come.