Part of her Formas del silencio suite of works, this composition speaks to a highly specific moment within Morales’ conceptual vernacular. A mid-career work, it contains a number of closed forms around a central nucleus that strives to assert itself, yet falling short, as if opposing forces hampered its expansion.

The artist was a founding member of Nuestro Arte, an artists’ group that searched for new paths for expression, breaking away from the Indigenismo and other clichés that were so well established in the island of Tenerife at the time, opting instead for a free-thinking art with no censorship and removed from the prevailing tradition.

Morales’ initial tenet is that form is the factor that adds wealth to matter and not the other way round. In consonance, she combines conventional material—like wood or bronze—with other industrial materials to express a world of her own. In her works, the strength does not come from the matter but from the concept she strives to materialise.

The work is powerful, not only in terms of its size, but also in the contrasting colours it achieves by using wood and the gilded metal outlining the forms that vibrate and gravitate against an intensely black background. The composition contacts directly with nature through a use of striking organic forms that produce a dynamic effect.

In Formas del silencio II the elements open up around the central nucleus, as if forming a pair of wings struggling to take to flight. In this mural work the artist manages to convey a feeling of amplitude and space and she does so using a technique that is usually conceived as a block and tends to have a consistency that is more solid than ethereal.

None of the elements in María Belén Morales’ work have been left to chance. Everything is the result of a thoroughly thought-out creative process and of a quest for a faultless finish. Morales exerts total control over the time spent in each one of her pieces, engaging deeply in each one of the steps of creation, in which the sculptor and the matter dialogue with each other as the abstract element of the tangible reality is materialised.