ABOUT THE ARTIST
With half a century of artistic experience and his forays into other creative areas in business and marketing alike, EL MORA has undergone an impressive journey both geographically and spiritually and creatively. He was self-taught and has remained so. His evolution as an artist, which spans from the humble beginnings in Salzburg/Austria to the shimmering coasts of Monte Carlo, tells the story of a man who constantly challenged the boundaries of his art, his creativity, and his own identity. He worked as a “young artist” in England, Antibes, and Innsbruck.
In the 1990s, there was a change. As a “wild artist” EL MORA broke free from traditional constraints and began creating bolder and more daring works. Places like Munich, Nice, and Palm Beach provided him both inspiration and a stage to showcase his works. His art became more controversial, more provocative, a reflection of his inner turmoil and the constant desire to reinvent himself.
With the turn of the millennium, EL MORA entered the “mature artist” phase. With over three decades of experience behind him, he found a middle ground between the youthful curiosity of his early years and the rebellious nature of his wild phase. His paintings testified to his ability to clearly and powerfully communicate his vision. Each of his paintings became a clear confession.
One of the experimentalist painters is EL MORA, who has transformed his classical/impressionistic painting into the “essentialist” ways of expressions. He paints the “essentials”, the skeletons and symbols of heads and genetlia, but he speakes to his audience by the use of colors. Somewhere, there is an art critic qualified to define EL MORA’s style of painting. I stick to the interpretation of colors, indicating the feelings of the artist, his mindset, his momentary thoughts based on memories, his spiritual pains and pleasures, which he communicated to us on the canvas. In short, I will reveal the artist’s innermost self, because each of his paintings is an honest confession.”
(Dr. Vajay, psychiatrist and art critic, Palm Beach)
"Confession of our fault is the next thing to innocence, wrote the roman poet Ovid. Elements of both – confession and innocence – inform the paintings of the artist who signs his work EL MORA. Not innocence in a sense of naivete Rather, I refer to an open-hearted plumbing of the heart and mind through art. And not confession in the sense of the unburdening of sins. Instead, the willingness – indeed the psychic necessity – to subject all of one’s emotions to analysis in accordance with the famed advice of another great classic figure: “Know yourself,” said Socrates and EL MORA’s career seems to me to be determined attempt to achieve that theoretically blessed states. Frankly, any possible significance never even occurred to me in the artists studio. I was too taken by the atmosphere of the place. I reeked of that most contagious of aphrodisiacs, enthusiasm. As for the style, it seems obvious that the artist is much influenced by European modernism, whether early Picasso or late Dubuffet. The style seems of secondary importance, however. It’s emotional freight it carries that matters. ART BRUT? EL MORA’s work is more like brutal honesty. Or, make that “essential” truths about himself.”
(Gary Schwan, art critic, Palm Beach Post)
Today, in the phase as a transition artist of transforming art, he transports his works from the past into today’s spirit. Today he lives and works in Salzburg and Madeira.
