Guillermo Mora 

Oral Memories

©2016 Video, Ministerio de Educacion, Cultura y Deporte

This video focuses on the artistic practice of Guillermo Mora being a mid career artist. He speaks on being diligent in his artistic practice and treating it as a profession rather than a job. How travelling abroad to study helped him cultivate his ideas about his art practice and the importance of constantly working to become better at developing your own language that can sustain you for years to come.

His practice is rooted in painting but using traditional painting mechanisms only to invert them, modify them and change the rules. Guillermo’s work is eye candy with exciting textures, energetic experimental constructions bringing new meaning from combining fragments and giving colour form. He reuses stretchers by adding hinges giving them multiple ways of existing.  He contrasts glossy finishes with cracked surfaces that expose eye-catching colours. He folds canvases and odd bits of his old works giving them a "second life".  He spoke of constantly questioning the process of painting through this re-building, recycling. His work has qualities similar to the French movement Supports and Surfaces where the subject is painting but using every avenue to deconstruct it. He says he likes to learn and be surprised through the making process instead of working out in advance what he is going to make. He’ll start with and idea getting lost along the way while working through this idea. “Meandering is great getting lost while you go places” He spoke of the importance of exhibiting your work as it teaches you how to organize and edit.