México, 1978

Moris has a BA in Plastic Arts from the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving “La Esmeralda” (INBA, Mexico  City). His work has been exhibited in outstanding institutions such as the Museum Tamayo of Contemporary Art in Mexico  City, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the 9th Havana  Biennial and the Forum of Contemporary Art of Santa Bárbara. He belongs to the selection of artists that make up the Younger  than Jesus: The Artist Directory, New Museum, New York and Phaidon Press.

His work belongs to collections such as the Bergé Collection in Madrid, the Jumex Collection in Mexico, MoCA, MoMA, David  Chipperfield, Isabel and Agustín Coppel, FEMSA Collection and the Americas. ASU Art Museum.

EDUCATION

BA in Fine Arts, National School of Painting, Sculpture, and Graphic Arts, La Esmeralda, National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA).  México City.

Moris

The search for definition starts from birth.

-Paul Valery

The work of artist Moris (Mexico City, 1978) is a search mechanism. In the space-time in which the work is developed, it  constructs and deconstructs its own argumentation. From Moris’s early work, the spectator can see that making art is nothing  but the intention of configuring, piece by piece, an everything that can counter Moris’s inconformity, his context and his place  in time as an artist. Production, then, is a systematic appropriation of models that are within reach; then comes their crossing  with languages that, first from empiric and then academic learning, will determine the values the work of art shall acquire.  The simultaneity in his creative and production processes is because of a possible maelstrom of recovery-recuperation and  montage-appearance dialectics. One could say that while Moris is sculpting an object, he is also unfolding a drawing; while  he is executing a painting, he is also assembling a suspended mobile; while he is ripping apart a canvas he found at the flea  market, he is going back to his basic composition exercises. 

Mexican art from the nineties and 2000s subsidized Moris’s generation and relieved it from jumping over the first  gap, instead asking it to look at and reference itself through contemporary universal art. However, Moris’s generation  understood that, even if distances had become shorter, discourses required the questioning of small things, the solving of  little problems, the understanding of such brevities inside the overflowing conjunction that surrounds them. Moris chose his  poverty, what happened inside his house and what moved about the streets of his neighborhood, to create an internal  dialogue that would give him movement, that would give him time and would enable him to flow. He understood how the  hidden strata worked, as a mine in the middle of a metropolis, and he identified the food chain of such an ecosystem. The art of collage is the most natural of forms Moris executes: a flow chart that never stops and that must be directed and limited so  it can be called art. This is not a movement from the lived and the touched to artistic or economic territory; this is pointing  out, in a treacherous and pernicious way, how everything that pretends to be is not: neither riches, nor power, nor culture,  nor calm, nor success. The reading between the lines that Moris’s art makes visible transcends, just like the corrupt scheme  of this country keeps it submerged in inequality and leaves no blank spaces. In this map of everything Moris started crafting  almost 20 years ago, everything must be occupied, everything must be devoured, everything must be said, like a resounding  answer against the unstoppable, invisible and gradual destruction we are submitted to in this world that only belongs to a  chosen few. The language Moris has deployed has formed a personal glossary that displaces the definitions the system has  allowed. Thus, this language is critical and officiant, through its illustrated framework, filled with profane motifs that are  denied or blended into everyday life. To face his work implies the same conditions one would face when being in mortal  danger: if nothing happens, memory will save the event through fear. It something happens, there will be nothing else to say.