Armando Morales Monograph and Catalogue Raisonné, 1974–20043-volume set :: by Raquel Tibol and Catherine Loewer :: Armando Morales

I needed a more direct contact with objectivity, with the concrete than what one sees. I needed something more readable, more easily digested. I wanted to have direct contact with people through figuration. And above all to be more of a painter than an artist.

This three-volume collection presents the work produced since 1974 of Nicaraguan painter, draftsman, and lithographer Armando Morales. At the time he was 47 and had firmly established his aesthetic platform. Yet after achieving international success in the 1960s for his boldly painted geometric abstractions, by the early 1970s, driven by a vital need and conscious effort to move away from the more abstract expressionist style he had been working in, he discovered post-abstract figuration. He also embarked upon a territory only partially pursued in previous decades: surrealism. In this second phase of Morales’s career he explores the human form with his series of nudes and plays with surrealist techniques in his still-lifes and everyday compositions.

One theme that remained constant throughout both his abstract and post-abstract career was his deep connection to his home country. While Nicaragua was too unstable to return to in his lifetime, Morales was still very tied to his country, even serving the revolutionary government of Nicaragua as a representative to UNESCO in Paris from 1982–1990. “With his paintings he is not trying to exert public pressure or to stimulate patriotic and nationalistic ideals in his native country, nor does he conceive of his art as a stabilizing force for a people on a slow path to recovery. His is a purely aesthetic exercise,” writes author Raquel Tibol. “Tenderness, sensuality, melancholy and human warmth, infuse [his work] giving it that much more power to communicate.”