The atmosphere is thick entering Colombian artist Delcy Morelos’ two-part exhibition of Cielo terrenal (2023, Earthly heaven) and El abrazo (2023, The Embrace) at Dia in Chelsea. There is no title or wall text provided in which predictive themes and the artist bio are laid out. Rather,the door opens to a sudden dim half-light, with amber tones pouring from two scrimmed skylights inside a cavernous industrial chamber. An invitation to look unencumbered but with care, slows things down immediately. Sight reaches for itself and is briefly disarmed, feet shuffling below, an inherent, embodied vulnerability to scraping or falling, a startled not-knowing in the gradual brightening. What appears first is a pungently dark soil – incredible browns with hints of green – coating the ground and walls upward a few feet, up to a kind of high-water mark. Plotted across the landscape lies an emergent landscape of stacked materials which recede all the way into the back of the space, an earth-lined room of seeming aftermath.

The allover effect initially evokes a floodplain, overwhelming, as if offering a soaring bird’s eye view upon architectural remnants of a now opaque civilization.(1) A bare cement path juts out into the semi-darkness, encouraging a closer look but also recalling the cordoned control of an archeological site or hazmat zone in which specimens are culled from sediment and put aside. This tension between a scaled model of ecological disaster, vast in scope, and the evidentiary inspection of bygone tools or bio-organic remains, sifted through for clues, is further complicated as the geometry of stacked up industrial elements – some of which remain partially buried – alternates with enigmatic, lined out accretions of hundreds of handed, ashen black ceramic forms resembling dung pellets but also tubers, rudimentary cups, munitions, and roots, each separated by formal likeness.

The more one peers at Morelos’ shadowy lowland the more one sees. What, at first, looks like the tracing of a mass burial, also steadily registers as a dissolve, a landscape longing for transformation, a being subsumed back into nature. I’m reminded of Socrates’ adage, ‘shape is that which alone of existing things always follows color’,(2) as the stagecraft within Cielo terrenal opens the hues of earth-covered forms to manifold readings, including a ritual interment of cataclysmic ecological proportions but also the drying out of a strange harvest, scented as it is with cinnamon and clove. Morelos’ cosmic vision propagates such contradictions: fallout and gestation, violence and healing. It maneuvers past narrow art historical thinking. Everything we touch is touched with earth – industrial and handed, embryonic and forged – including ourselves, readying to be returned to its source. Brought resolutely back to earth, via the grounding in Morelos’ title and the tripping about in the dark of just having a look around, the transition from color to shape to reparative reading gradually unfolds, inevitably carrying with it a slow-building specter of so many displaced and disappeared associations: the great acceleration of ecological crises, ongoing land grabs, wars old and new, and the unendingness of everyday violence.(3) In short order, Morelos deftly recasts the horizon line of the installation as terrestrial inheritance and responsibility, that which begins beneath our feet and extends to a sense of care-taking (or not) reawakened in the dark, the binding possibility of a reciprocal sublime coming into visibility. No small feat.

Indeed, the hesitation that results between timescales in Cielo terrenal, that of the Anthropocene era looming and seeds quietly germinating with or without us, is amplified in passing to the day-lit second gallery, where El abrazo abruptly rises, temple-like. A towering mass of earth that appears to hover and oscillate into the rafters, the rippling immediacy of El abrazo pushes one to set off around its offset behemoth trapezoidal formations. It quickens things. Flecked with blades of hay that tremble in the circulating air, the reddish ochre of top soil climbs vertically, dominating the room, and eventually reveals a crevasse cut far into its center. Morelos has repeatedly referred to it in interviews as the mountain offering her embrace. Visitors are invited to enter, completely enveloping themselves in the aromatic surround. The scenting of El Abrazo is notably stronger and refreshed weekly.

Even as a range of sacred architectural forms come to mind – ziggurat, mastaba, monolith, and more simply, a cave – the fragility of the surface and encouragement from gallery attendants that the work can be gently touched, conveys a breathing, pulsing sense of aliveness. The mountain’s embrace is imposing and regenerative in its synesthetic caress. The unsettling of the first installation gives way to an encompassing force here. A truly moving transition, the affective swing from peering down to beholding, from unnerved to rapt, vibrates in all of its full, elongated measure.

The surety of Morelos’ interlocking use of such threshold dynamics at Dia speaks to more than ten years of working with soil and clay in large-scale formats. Hard-won technologies of intricate construction are at play, including nearly four years of planning and collaboration for the exhibition. Born in 1967 and educated in Cartagena, Morelos’ own background as an abstract painter is felt in the precise geometric contours and finely worked surfaces – rippling immediacy and flooded aftermath are not easy effects – of her immersive installations. Likewise, an in-depth study of Indigenous mythologies, ritual, and traditional craft is present in Morelos’ work, active not only in her choice of specific materials, but in the unapologetic and compressed symbolism of her titles, and her insistent underscoring, in interviews, of the violence that Indigenous peoples regularly experience, including the ongoing expropriation of land in her own hometown and throughout Latin America. This perspective includes the artist’s reference to her grandmother’s lineage within the Emberá people of the rural Tierralta region of her upbringing, in northern Colombia, and extends to Morelos’ own guided study over the past decade of the language and philosophy of the Amazonian Uitoto people of southern Colombia and northern Peru.

The mix of copaiba oil in scenting El abrazo, sourced from tree resin used in Indigenous Amazonian medicine to treat illness and bulwark the immune system, speaks directly to the work as a kind of salve and caution within Morelos’ versioning and re-direction of Minimalist and Land Art parameters and strategies. As Morelos attests in a recent interview, working ambivalently within such legacies can nevertheless effect a dismantling: ‘The fear and arrogance – they go hand in hand – of the patriarchal labyrinth have destroyed our ancestral connection with nature.’(4) Tellingly, Morelos’ overwriting and balming extends to the markings along the concrete floor from Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses, installed in 1997-98, curving out here and there, from under the mountainous shimmer and womb-like embrace of El Abrazo. Similarly, the industrial elements chosen by Morelos for Cielo terrenal – floorboards, rebar, piping, felt, and I-beams – turn out to be salvaged material from past installations at Dia Beacon, in this case from installations by artists Dan Graham, Robert Morris, and Dorothea Rockburne, all fully resonant artists in their own right. Headed for the landfill, the very substrate of the institution is subtly brought in for a ritual treatment and re-presence in Morelos’ adroit, reparative layering.(5)

Agility at tracing such aesthetic lineage while weaving it into profoundly new territory has brought much wider awareness to Morelos’ work, including three high-profile immersive installations in 2022, that together provided a kind of hinge moment of international attention. This included Oración, Horizonte (Prayer, Horizon) presented at the Aichi Triennale in Tokoname, Japan. Spread throughout a former earthenware pipe factory, Morelos populated a low-slung immense platform across multiple rooms with hundreds of ovoid clay shapes resembling cookies or mochi, but also egg-like forms, ethereally spiced. A ceremonial precision

presided over the blanketing gesture as Morelos directly invoked reference offerings made to Pachamama, the ancestral Earth Mother goddess celebrated in the Andes Mountain region as both life-giving and capable of earthquakes. Acknowledged by a range of Indigenous ritual practices, including those of mountain farmers, Pachamama rituals include wafers and other edible gifts buried to honor the goddess’ abundance, while welcoming crops to come. A similar energy of incubation ordered Morelos’ carefully choreographed rows, as if awaiting a next transformation by kiln, or rising slowly like bread to be consumed. In sharp contrast, El lugar del alma (2022, The Place of the Soul) paid further explicit tribute to Pachamama by constructing a meditative path of earthwork passages in the sub-basement exhibition space of the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires. Sited below ground where tremors occur, Morelos posited the soil high, well above eye-level, guiding visitors through deep subterranean cuts.

Somewhere in between these installations was Earthly Paradise, her most visited work to date, included in the Venice Biennale of 2022, The Milk of Dreams. Its composite of scented earth ran torso-high in the Arsenale, allowing the visitor to see ahead and behind, even as it pushed one left and right, acting against the railroad architecture of the space. Encountered at the halfway point of the densely packed show, Morelos’ geometric passageway lifted the viewing experience back to the body’s full range of perception, toe to ceiling, as if passing through a cleansing and dank rejuvenation. The gaze, newly buoyant, was brought back to the porous tactility of earth on hand but also the brickwork hugged by Morelos’ intervening touch. Putting the building’s colossal non-contemporaneity in stark relief, the proximity of fellow travelers alongside rushed back: nothing less than time fully reinstated. Held by earth, the hall was called to attention, its circular brick columns encircled, stirring echoes of fleet-building and weaponry, in the venue’s history as a place where leviathans of seaworthy warfare and destruction came to life. Far from a labyrinth, Morelos’ sculpture-as-threshold issued a reminder of corporeal plenitude and openness amid the excess.

This porous boundary quality extends to her first-ever show under gallery representation, currently on view at Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris (El oscuro de abajo, 14.10 - 21.12.2023). A highly distilled selection of paintings and drawings from over twenty years, the works consistently give off a not-quite-fixed sense of humidity and circulation. In the series La doble negación (2006, Double Negation), for example, layer upon layer of acrylic paint drapes over pieces of hanging cotton mesh, to the point of retaining the formal gravity of each almost-drip along the textile grid. The surface shines, as if congealing, and prods you to look for a pooling below that is absent. Likewise, the inclusion of a sequence of four large paintings on paper from an early series, En la trama personal (2004, In the personal web), shows an attuned, inside-out seeping within Morelos’ reduced abstraction. The zoomed-in grids resemble the warp-and-weft of threading but also the marbling of bone and tendon newly cleaved, overlaid lattices of varying red to white with tiny rivulets beading against rose-tinted backdrops. Arranged horizontally, the slats take on a carceral perspective of immanence laid bare, a view out – the individual bodily perspective is magnified as a boundary condition, a study in separation seeking company.

Agua salada organizada (2014, Salted water organized) furthers this as painted burlap strips are superimposed into stacks and pinned to the wall, gnomic volumes. Built-up, lacquered variations of red and brown, they hang in exacting pairs, intensely close yet separate, gleaming with a kind of seeking proximity. As if excised from larger monochromatic wholes, they push out from the wall and appear set high to be dried, fresh kills. Obstáculo (2006, Obstacle) similarly presents as a subtle lineation of blood and earth tones on cotton, finely grained red, brown, and beige marks reminiscent of sediment settling. Not unlike the fine striation coating everything in the wake of a swollen river’s retreat, Obstáculo rises here like a cautionary view in Morelos’ vision. We are resolutely within the landscape, even as it rifts and mends, part and parcel of it. Horizons unfolding beneath our feet.