1990 – 2000
Munich (Germany), Palm Beach (Florida/USA), Eze Village (South of France)
Like the constant commuting between the two continents of Europe and the USA, in painting and in my life, it was like a struggle between two fronts for me. On the one hand the attempt to keep myself under control and on the other hand to let me, my thoughts and the style and colors of my pictures run wild. In excessive nighttime sessions under the influence of alcohol, inspired by fascinating women, my expressive and passionate pictures with deep psychological meaning were created. Without being interviewed, Dr. Béla Vaja, an excellent American psychologist, described my pictures and their statements in the book “Every painting is a confession”.
Some paintings were analyzed by Dr. Vaja. His words about the period:
“I am an experienced psychological analyst for many years and an art and color analyst since 1985. I have analyzed many paintings created by experimentalist painters. One of the experimentalist painters is EL MORA, who transformed his classical impressionistic painting into the essentialist ways of expressions.
He paints the ESSENTIALS, the skeletons and the symbols of heads and genitalia, but he speaks to his audience by the use of colors. Somewhere there is an art critic qualified to define EL MORAS’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. I will reveal the artist’s innermost self, because each of his paintings is an honest confession.”
REVIEW „WILD ARTIST 1990 – 2000“
It was somehow the most interesting years that I lived and enjoyed to the full. This time gave me enough basis to work for the next 20 years. I cannot describe in words what I experienced in retrospect. It would sound implausible. But I can express it in my paintings.
I miss my large art studio on North County Road directly above the Chuck and Harold’s, corner of Royal Poinciana Way. There I had my big opening exhibition and various personalized exhibitions. In Palm Beach, people liked to be private. So it happened that I had exhibitions in the millionaire’s mansions for a small group of people. Each year was one of my paintings at the big Red Cross Ball and the Red Cross event at the Polo Club.
The main local art critic was Gary Schwan of the Palm Beach Post. It took him several years to watch me before he was ready to make his judgment on my art.
His words about my art: “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.