Gonzalo Morales Leiva
Gonzalo Morales Leiva
Multidisciplinary artist
Born in Chile (1985) Gonzalo Morales Leiva’s artistic work emerges from a personal method entitled ‘Methodology for transiting from the surface to the body through the materiality of drawing’. Through processes of physical improvisation and meditation, he explores subjective states where responsiveness takes shape in sculptures, drawings, videos, and photographs. His actions are built around his body as the primary medium, communicating through memory and haptic perception rather than conceptual invention. These actions link his personal and communal experiences with Latin American history, fiction, and poetry—creative fields he draws upon to enrich his aesthetic explorations, notably influenced by his interest in Quechua culture. This cultural interest is shaped by the literature of Ecuadorian writer Jorge Icaza, Peruvian writer José María Arguedas, the Quechua poetry and linguistic studies of Peruvian poet Odi Gonzales, and the nature-infused poetry of Chilean poet Jorge González Bastias. With this approach he creates installations that convey his multi-sensory and collective perspective on art, dissolving disciplinary boundaries and establishing affective and political connections with the contextual realities present at the moment of creation.
In his performances, the need to work beyond the space delimited a priori by the performance itself is perceived, and his interest in continuing to create once the action has ended becomes evident. This has led him to engage artistically with the phantasmatic residues of the disappeared action. In this sense, the recordings, texts, photographs, or other types of sculptures generated during his actions—encountered by the spectator outside the time of the performance—contain a high degree of ambivalent performativity: their status transcends the documentary.
