GABRIEL MORENO ARTIST
ABOUT MY ARTWORK
"For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible." Rainer Maria Rilke.
My work emerges from a hypersensitivity to the beauty of the female figure, as an attempt to preserve its essence. Being a highly aesthetic work, and born viscerally, it responds to a need for calming an obsession - a strategy for operating as a “civilized Jean-Baptiste Grenouille,” and a vehicle through which I communicate. My ability to express emotions and concepts is directly proportional to my ability to translate them into the skin of the women I draw.
Woman - her face, her beauty - is treated superficially throughout the history of humanity, her figure exalted and admired like a porcelain vase. My drawing demonstrates delicacy, strength, sensuality or fragility as a value in itself; as a canvas in which all realms, both sensorial and intellectual, manifest my only way of seeing and making sense of the world - through a woman.
Images and ideas need contrast, and by drawing in black and white my visual language is confined to shadow and light. Conceptual contrasts are furthered by subject matter and aesthetic contradictions, expressed in two levels of reading: pencil lines that show beauty and hide fragility, fear, ephemeron, sensuality, and tattoo lines, coursing through the skin of the figure and revealing what its beauty hides.
My creative process begins with simple, easy lines of pencil or pen, or clay modeling, that continuously take shape until they become a female figure. My inspiration and work tools have created a world of urban and contemporary women, living between the roughness of their tattoos and the finesse of their elegant outlines. These lines draw women in black and white, and evolve into colors that cover their skin, conveying sensations that range from seduction to obsession - tattoos that stand out with color amidst white, delicate bodies invoking emptiness.
EXHIBITIONS AND FAIRS
• May 2008. The Urban Art Show. Collective exhibition. The Old Cinema Gallery. London.
• March 2010. Solo Exhibition. Ouch My Eye Gallery. Seattle.
• April 2011. Collective exhibition. Conquistadores. Strychnin Gallery. Berlin.
• May 2011. Solo exhibition. Seize Gallery. Marseille.
• July 2012. Collective exhibition. Green Card Gallery. New York.
• October 2012. Solo exhibition. A Cuadros Gallery. Madrid
• May 2013. Solo exhibition. Cartel Gallery. Granada.
• December 2014. Collective exhibition. The color of optimism AECID. Berlin, Frankfurt, Oslo and New York.
• February 2015. Collective exhibition. The color of optimism. AECID, Berlin, Frankfurt and Rome.
• September 2015. Art Fair Seoul. Korea.
• September 2015. Art Fair Battersea. London.
• September 2015. Art Fair. New York City.
• October 2015. At Fair. Stockholm.
• October 2015. Asia Contemporary Art Show. Hong Kong.
• November 2015. Solo exhibition in Valencia. Pepita Lumier Gallery. Spain.
• January 2016. Solo exhibition. Retrospect Galleries. Byron Bay, Australia.
• March 2016. Art Fair. Londres.
• March 2016. Art Fair. Hong Kong.
• May 2016. Collective exhibition. Traveling exhibition Spanish illustrators, The color of optimism. Washington, Miami and México.
• September 2016. Art Fair Seoul. Korea.
• September 2016. Art Fair. New York City.
• September 2016. Art Fair. Stockholm.
• November 2016. Art Fair. Hamburg.
• November 2016. Art Basel SCOPE. Miami.
• December 2016. Art Fair. Singapore.
• February 2017. AAF Brusseles
• March 2017. Art Fair. London Battersea
• March 2017. AAF New York
• May 2017. AAF Hong Kong
• October 2017. AAF Stockholm
• November 2017. Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum Madrid, Venus, Collective exhibition.
• December 2017. Art Basel SCOPE. Miami.
• February 2018. Hampstead Art Fair
• May 2018. Hong Kong Art Fair
• December 2018. Context Art Miami.
• March 2019. London Art Fair
• December 2019. Context Art Miami
• December 2021. Art Miami
• December 2022. Art Miami
