For Teresa Moro, “the Relic Effect” is the emotion that stirs inside her when she comes across an object (which could be a palette, a stool, the bed...) that might have belonged to or have been used by an artist, present or past, who she admires. They are usually quite ordinary things which have become unique due to a close relationship with their owners.

In classical antiquity revered items related to heroes, even clothing and furniture, were kept in sanctuaries, possessing a protective mission. It is this purpose that interests Teresa Moro most and, encouraged by her passion for tracking, collecting and archiving, a few years ago she launched her own personal relic rescue campaign, as a defensive strategy to counter the dangers she felt were besieging the contemporary creator.

The aim of the project is to show part of the precious cache of objects found by Moro on her real or virtual pilgrimages, which she classifies in a special graphic archive. Moro has transferred this archive onto her studio wall, which eventually comes to resemble a votive altar.

Each of the relics that Moro presents is a memory evoked in the present and projected into the future thanks to the act of preserving it. The traces of the belongings of those artists is preserved latently in their personal objects and will come to life thanks to the fact of collecting them, and these traces will survive in the work executed using their invocation.

The exhibition at the MARCO has been arranged according to a layout which provides the visitor with clues and draws a subtle storyline in parallel to this series of revelations and discoveries: from the Peepholes on doors that allow us to glimpse interiors, to the Postcards with exterior views of the artists’ home-studios and to the Studios themselves –with their desks treated in the manner of still-lifes– and finally to the actual series of Relics, made up of more personally chosen objects, such as tools and work clothes. In a similar vein, the second room displays the Beds series, which brings together older pieces and ones made last year.

Teresa Moro has envisaged this project as a transplanting of the daily ritual of the studio into an exhibition space setting, an invitation to the public to let them in on the inner secrets of the cult of painting, interspersing archive photographs with drawings and paintings that gradually take over the exhibition space. Revealing the staging, the liturgy; replicating tools and work spaces with her paintbrush, offering the public a chance to enter her most personal daily world and surround their steps with the intimacy of the creative process.

This book is available for purchase at the Museum’s Bookshop (LASAL BOOKS) and also online www.lasalbooks.com