Artist statement

Title of the show:  S.O.S. message in a bottle. Original plain and traditional temple oils on canvases by Carlos Mora Ninci. 


Am I a fine artist? Why do I create with temple and oil? What is my painting about, and why I do it?

I create works of art, thus, one could claim that  I am an artist. But I am not an artist in the sense that I have not done the usual carreer of an artist.  I have had several other professions before, for instance, I was a university full professor of social sciences, a high school and Elementary bilingual teacher.  I am a doctor of philosophy in education from the university of California at Los Angeles. I hold other two university degrees in letters and in linguistics from Boulder, Colorado; and thru other five different graduate programs.  I held a job as a full professor for eight years and won tenure.  At 48 I decided to change my profession to that of a fine artist. This was more forced on me than by my voluntary decision.  I was never fired from a job, but I withdrew from a full time faculty position in 2002 and even rejected a good four years contract with the university of Florida in 2006. After my third divorce in 2007, I went to live in the sierras of Cordoba, in a solitary home at the end of two routes, in the midst of ancient trees, woods all around and near a fast falling mountain river, surrounded by all sorts of birds and wild animals, with plenty of parrots and pigeaons making noise and love all day long.  Lonely and with very little savings, an old car, and my first cell phone.  

One day my two small children were visiting and I took them to an art exhibition at the local community hall, they came back home and wanted to paint. I brought all the materials from my ex-wife studio in the backyard and we started painting together.  The first time in my life that I held brushes with oil. The next day, my daugther called from Texas and asked to please do some work, for after six months of living alone and getting more poor I had do something to get out of depression, she suggested that I  work in something like carpentry or electricity for the village. I was on the cell phone with her and painting at that very same time. So, I decided that I could be the painter of the village.  I am not sure now  if I qualify to be the artist of Calamuchita, because we have many people who can fill in that position, although nobody really wants to be called themselves that either.  We are not artista per se ....  we are neighbours, workers, friends, doctors, mechanics, etc. But nobody wants to be called a fine artist.  We hold a  community painting exhibition every year, participate in about eight plein air competition each year, and organize exciting shows of live music, drama, dances, and photography whenever possible just as simple human beings who want to do something besides work for the living. I paint regardless if I am in the good mood for it or if I am inspired or not, if I feel well or ill. I just keep on doing it day and night.  I ran completely out of savings and am not doing anything else but painting temple and oil on canvases ever since.  If you were to ask why I do not do something else that would provide some reasonable resources for living? It is just because it is difficult to change and learn another profession, and I had done that many times already with the same results;  or what would I like to do for a living?....M mhhh.. not painting, perhaps dancing tango or playing music, but I am not a dancer or a musician. So, I guess I am stocked with being a temple and oil painter.

I have not any idea why I work with temple and oil, and why I prepare painting materials in a such a cumbersome way with all the imprimations and paint craft-made with old non high technological proceedures. I do not particularly like all the tedious methods of craftly preparing each single stretching bar and imprimating the linen for the canvases with ancient pre-Renascentist formulas, mixing several ingredients during days in a slowly cooking process that  makes the paste that will form the bases for each painting.  Then mixing linen, wallnut or almendra ¿¿ oils with local pigments to make some of the fine and thickly colours each time in a unique and unreproduceable manner.  Why don’t I just pick some ready-made acrylic paint from the nearest store in town, instead of finding local walnut oils or acacia resins as media for mixing with the pigments? I am not sure why I do all that.  I just learnt how to do it. Perhaps it might be related to my childhood predilection for laboratory chemestry. It is difficult to let go and change what gives the results one expects.  I guess I only do things this way because I have the knowledge to do it that way.  For not particular reason.

I do not have a style or a theme, or any specific message.  I guess some critics might want to interpret my visual messages. I do not know all about myself. I am sure of certain aspects of my personality and history. I have always been a sort of public person. Art is essentially public. I used to create art and show them only to small group of friends, until I had the studio packed with over 100 paintings, and I began to show them to a larger public in small villages around here in the Calamuchita sierras, then I learnt that art is to be shown to all humans, to anybody, anywhere.  Thus, my message is a public and political statement. It is a critique of the state of the world. A call for reflexion and change of actions, for a social and political revolution.  I wrote two books that very few people read.  I made art exhibitions that nobody actually watches nor cares about.  I do not know what else to do. My paintings are expressionism from the deepest of my soul and mind but connected to the political world and humanity.  I seek to express through an aesthetic message a call for profound genuine change in the way the world and the social consioussness is organized.  I dislike social class differences, indifference, and the unjust order of things.  I do not know why I have such morals and expectations.

I seek to impact with color rather than with form, to suggest rather than describe, to touch deep rather than scratch the surface, to motivate what is underneath rather than the explicit, to dig in the past to imagine the future  and forget for a momento on the immediate presence of the present so observers will look closer and watch over several times, and perhaps retain the image and realize the message. I am not concerned with triggering excitement or procuring pleasure to the eyes, but with expressiong human feelings that might be as good as bad with the aesthetic conviction that nature provides and organizes while some humans seek to transform and destruct and re-construct to show themselves the power of their will, regardless of the consequences and damages to others and the planet.  I guess my work is a continuation of my writing and thinking in the social and philosophical fields but this time working with brushes and colours.  Do not ask me how I ended up with brushes instead of guns or roses.

For some strange reason that I now learn, I like to paint in public, I like to go to live contests, or paint in the parks or studios with other painters sharing.  It is as if I want to send a public message, the art is a public statement and I paint in public. I do not prepare art projects or series on a pictorial topic, nor work on consignments, That is why I consider my work extremely political, that I do with perseverance, dedication and difficulty, an act of pedagogy. Pedagogy as practice for liberation.  I leave it the critics who know how to write and relate the unrelated, to explain why I do what I am doing.  I am just doing it and this is a show of my work.  I really hope it triggers something in your spirit and that you will relate to the message. Or perhaps the next time you will have the chance to come to another of my shows.  I only wish you could have a glimpse of what it is in my paintings with the small sample that reached your shores. They are definitelly an S.O.S . message in a bottle sent to the other end of the oceans.