Guillermo Mora – not your usual acrylic painter
“It would be amazing to see all the paintings of the world separated from their canvases and falling on the ground.”
Spanish artist Guillermo Mora is coming to a London gallery near you. I recently interviewed the man and he proved to me why he’s worth your time.
What is it that you enjoy the most about working with layers and layers of acrylic paint? And also what you enjoy the least about it?
Layers in life, layers in painting. Painting is not far from the way everything is constructed. We are made of layers as well. I like to conceive painting as a body, as something not eternal but alive, clumsy, tired, and capable of losing its entire shape or parts of it. Flaubert used to say: “as soon as we come to this world, pieces of us begin to fall”. I feel this exact way on painting. It would be amazing to see all the paintings of the world separated from their canvases and falling on the ground.
On the other hand, it’s weird for me to say something that I dislike about painting, but I could say its autonomy. Even though you think you can control all its processes, it always cheats you. There’s always something unexpected. Life is unexpected and painting is too.
What’s your creative process like?
“Add, subtract, multiply and divide” is my statement (and the presentation of my website). I think these words not only belong to mathematics but also to our everyday acts, thoughts and behaviors. Painting is a complex body in the world in which all these actions can take place too.
How did you feel when you won the Audemars Piguet award?
First of all, surprised. I was competing with very well known international artists and I never expected I could be the one that got it. Then I said to myself: “Guillermo, from now on you have to work much harder.” When you win an international award, it puts you immediately in a new position. I realized how less important the economical aspect of my work is. It’s true that money helps, but the most important thing was that a lot of people started to pay attention to my stuff. From the moment you win a prize, you have to demonstrate why you won it.
You have an upcoming group exhibition entitled Saturation II – Add Subtract Divide. And you’ve also described defined your work by including multiplying. In what way do you feel that your work accomplishes these operations?
Adding has always been linked to the idea of painting but we have to think that when we add something we subtract possibilities to it too. Then if I want to add, I have to divide the material into pieces, and this action is also a way of multiplying. These four actions are not as different as we think and can be easily included in my everyday process. They help me to uphold the idea of a constant changing painting.
If not Spain, where else would you like to permanently set up a studio and why?
United Kingdom for its contradictions and irreverences. Things happen when controversy is constantly present.
SATURATION II – Add Subtract Divide opening at the Copperfield Gallery
Paint is not a dead art. Especially not when six unique Spanish artists rehash the painted form and naught but maths ensues.
Paint is not a dead art. Especially not when six unique Spanish artists rehash the painted form and naught but maths ensues.
After the success of the first SATURATION exhibition series, the Spanish Contemporary Art Network (SCAN) brings us their sequel act in the Copperfield Gallery.
The past century has seen a slow, almost degenerative decline in the traditional art of painting. The painted image has almost become jaded in the minds of the average contemporary artist. But six Spanish artists are boldly revisiting this in an abstract form by utilizing new technologies.
If painting is to art what Euclid is to geometry – then this exhibition glorifies the intangible. Add Subtract Divide provides us with the experimentation that our modernistic eyes so sorely crave. There is a deep emphasis on the art of layering; the works are not bound by the uniplanar visual form – paint simply applied to a canvas. The works successful blur the boundary of painting tradition.
This exhibition certainly does what it says on the tin. Expect to see an addition of paint (a sheer, bloated mass of pure acrylic in one case) as well as a subtraction and division of the materials that make up a painting. By exploring forms such as trompe l’oeil and collages, the notion of a modernist geometric painting is explored and scrutinised.
Artists:
MARÍA ACUYO
RUBÉN GUERRERO
GUILLERMO MORA
SONIA NAVARRO
LOIS PATIÑO
ALAIN URRUTIA
6 Copperfield Street, London SE1 0EP
15th July at 6:30pm
Images via Copperfield Gallery website