Disorienting space

On Monday morning, a boom lift inside the University Art Museum at New Mexico State swayed as two people, standing in its basket carefully applied blue painter’s tape to a wall overlooking a second-story balcony.

For several days, artist Carlos Morales-Silva has been preparing a mural spanning two walls of the museum’s Mullennix Bridge Gallery titled “Border Destroyer,” with an opening reception set for Friday evening. He worked alongside Cassidy Fritts, a fellow muralist and painter from San Antonio, Texas.

Carlos Morales-Silva applies painter’s tape as he prepares a wall for a mural at NMSU’s Museum of Art in Las Cruces on Sept. 23, 2024.

An El Paso native from a large family still rooted in the community, Morales-Silva is now based in New York but said he was enjoying an extended stay here, teaching an advanced painting class at NMSU and incorporating a display of several students’ paintings into his mural.

The student works emerged from an assignment Morales-Silva presented to students last spring, to compose works responding to their environment.

He spoke of environment – physical and cultural – as a driving force in his own development as an artist, rooted in the history, architecture and topography of the Rio Grande region.

“There's something about this place that has burned and imprinted onto me, just a way of seeing,” he said. “Part of it is the landscape –you can see so far in any direction, because everything is so low lying. The sky is so like spectacular most days, like, just like the depth of field that you can see is really kind of disorienting in a way.”

Yet within that open view, he described taking in views of White Sands Missile Range, Fort Bliss, El Paso and Ciudad Juárez from the region’s mountain ranges, and their cultural context. “That kind of perception is really unique here,” he continued. “It’s kind of a disorienting space, and that's what a lot of my work is about.”

The mural under development presented fortress-like structural shapes in contrast with flowing waves resembling paisley or floral forms, and intense combinations of colors that almost seem to hiss.

“The general idea was to have this kind of abstracted version of a border wall crawling around, and these kind of big sun shapes bursting through it and creating these abstract color fields,” Morales-Silva said, “Organic shapes that are growing out of it, kind of bursting through the fence.”

On one side, the more organic shapes predominate and serve as a platform for several student works that explore shape, color and texture in a variety of modes, some more abstract, some less.

“I wanted it to be about the possibilities of education and art education, and to have the actual work of the students that I've been working with,” Morales-Silva said.

“A lot of my work is trying to find those combinations in unique form with unique colors,” he continued. “Some of that comes from brightly colored buildings that are around the area, but it's also become a really deep study of color theory, a really deep study of formalism … I think it's all kind of based in the way that I learned how to see here.

“There's a lot of complex things going on at all times, just like in the landscape and just like in the culture and in the politics.”

Morales-Silva used similar elements in his first Los Angeles exhibition, “Border Logic,” in 2023, with paintings of various sizes and combinations of abstract shapes, colors and surface textures.

His distinctive murals include an installation at the San Antonio Museum of Art and a 2,000-foot mural facing two sides of W. 34th Street in New York City.

“Border Destroyer” will be on display through March 8, 2025. The opening reception on Sept. 27 will run from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., along with the opening of two other exhibits at the UAM: “Carolyn Salas: Night Vision” and “Warhol & Friends.” More information is available online at uam.NMSU.edu.