Camino de vuelta

Guillermo Mora

2023

Moisés Pérez de Albéniz Gallery, Madrid

THE WAY BACK

“We think with the objects we love;

we love the objects we think with.”1

Sherry Turkle

I remember how some of my professors at the Facultad de Bellas Artes in Madrid used to say that brushes caked in dried paint could keep painting. They insisted that those bristles, no matter how dry and brittle, still had the ability to produce a “gesture”. I liked thinking about how those tools, through use and over time, gradually left their virtuous side behind and began to function like little catapults, moving globs of paint from the palette to the canvas. At the same time, the build-up of paint made them their own support, pictorial objects in their own right.

After university, I began to imagine that a painting might awaken, peel away from its support and find its way back, a return journey to completely cover the tools that were building it; as if the picture were not enough, as if its marks, traces and gestures had to overcome and devour the objects that formed it. A painting that turns back and gobbles up its own brushes and other studio elements, like Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, which—mythological analysis aside—presents us with a painting that devours itself.

I then turned that thought into a studio routine. Day after day, I made a point of covering different objects related to my life and artistic practice in paint. The more paint I applied to them, the more inaccessible their initial reality became. Every new coat of colour made the shape of those objects harder to identify, but I also noticed that, as a result of their mutation, these “useful” instruments moved from the functional to the intellectual plane and hinted at new narratives. In their metamorphosis, those objects linked to my pictorial universe made me reconsider their purpose and significance.

The pieces I present in this exhibition trace a way back from the painting to the object, rendering the utilitarian symbolic. The paint has leapt off the support and mingled with the tools in my studio. Colourful stains envelop and engulf them to form tiny beings, new bodies. What were once mere tools from the world of painting are now objects that reflect my daily studio practice.

For now, I can say that these new objects have left their practical world and begun to create a new one. Whatever they may be, they make me think of painting.

Guillermo Mora

January 2023

1 «Turkle, Sherry, Evocative objects: things we think with, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2007.