A day with you

Guillermo Mora

2021

Irène Laub Gallery, Brussels

The pieces presented in the exhibition set up a story and construct a collective portrait through an autobiographical perspective. The origin of the project is a series of memorization exercises inspired by people who crossed the artist’s path. While first retaining the colors of the clothes these people were wearing, Mora subsequently materializes them in his studio by assembling and overlaying small pieces of paper.

This visual diary, made up of delicate and colored sketches compiled on a daily basis, constitutes the core of this exhibition. Each work embodies one of these patterns, one of these people. The pieces hence not only display a particular range of color but also reflect a name, a day, a meeting, a wish, a memory. Through a unique pictorial process of superposition, concealment, tearing and unveiling, Guillermo Mora literally “dresses and undresses” his paintings. A day with you is above all a story documenting the people Mora encountered in the past year.

Through this collective portrait, which is both specific and abstract, the paintings transform themselves into pages; paintings as pages, pages as paintings, as dates, as characters passing through one’s life and that ultimately testify to the artist’s closest and most intimate environment.