With the support of:
Deputación de Pontevedra

Just as the year 2022 is ushered in, MARCO, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vigo, launches its programme with a solo show devoted to Teresa Moro (Madrid, 1970). The show, titled The Relic Effect, offers the public a project that conveys the artist’s passion for collecting, searching, and archiving singular objects, in an act, via painting, of resistance and recognition.

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.

Documentation

The Library-Documentation Center at MARCO has prepared a documentary dossier which brings together links to articles and other information about the artist, which is available on the website www.marcovigo.com [17] at Library/News and Exhibitions/Present

Learning activities

With the support of: Obra Social “la Caixa”

From the 18^th of January, 2022
Hours: Tuesday to Friday from 11am to 1:30pm
For booking please call +34 986 113900 Ext. 100/ +34 986 113908/ email comunicacion@marcovigo.com [18]

Workshops for Children

With the support of: Obra Social “la Caixa”

From the 15^th of January, 2022
Hours: Saturdays from 11am to 12:30pm (age 3-6) and de 12:30pm to 2pm (age 7-12)
For booking please call +34 986 113900 Ext. 100/ +34 986 113908/ email: recepcion.marco@gmail.com [19]

Information & guided tours

The exhibition staff is available for any questions or information, as well as regular guided tours:

Daily at 6pm
‘A la carte’ group tours, please call +34 986 113904 / 113908 to book

Interactive routes through the Vigo App

The new interactive route system through the ‘Vigo App’ allows visitors to access all kinds of content about the exhibition (videos, images, specific information about the works), either in the space itself through the beacons or bluetooth devices located in the exhibition rooms, or anywhere else, following the route from the mobile screen once the application has been downloaded , or from your computer through Concello de Vigo’ website.

Download:

PR_TERESA MORO_Eng.pdf [20]

Contact Sheet_captions_TERESA MORO_Eng.pdf [21]

Dossier_Teresa Moro.pdf [22]

Artists

Teresa Moro [23]

Curatorial text

Visiting an artist’s studio is a revealing experience: on entering, the observant visitor will discover the artist’s materials, working method, background and even customs. Some are reigned by an almost strict order, others by a disorder in which one can invariably find meaning; in all of them the artist navigates with surprising deftness.

Some artists classify their brushes and pencils, arranging them in a perfectly turned-out military order. Others let their paintings pile up in rooms and corridors. Some work on several pieces at the same time spreading them across their studio walls, whereas others concentrate their efforts on a single venture. Studios always used to contain a drawing table, a telephone area and a strategically placed chair for viewing the progress of a piece.

Teresa Moro (Madrid 1970) has spent years frequenting these spaces –visiting her friends, travelling to inspect the studios of artists whose work she admires or feels connected to– and collecting prints or copies of pictures downloaded from the internet. She uses this material to build her own, mostly small format, drawings and paintings, observing things from the front, against seemingly neutral backgrounds, and rendering them in her extremely personal style.

Glasses, pipes, desks, brushes, paint tubes, palettes, chairs, sofas, clothes, books, doors, peepholes, plaques, stairs, objects… and artists’ beds have caught her eye and have been depicted by her on canvas or paper. The outcome is a tribute to painting, to the act of painting and possibly her response to the words of her revered Ángel González García: “Who knows what painters do in their studios? Sleeping? Dreaming perchance?”.

Miguel Fernández-Cid / Pilar Souto Soto

Artist's text

The Relic Effect

“This project is fuelled by a burning passion for searching, collecting and archiving. The collector that interests me is the one who uses their skill to analyse the past with a view to understanding the present and projecting it into the future. The enterprise will turn out to be a happy one, as long as they accept that one of the inherent pleasures of collecting is the fact it will never end.

In classical antiquity, collections of venerable objects related to heroes, including their clothes and furniture, were stored at sanctuaries. At first the Greeks did not attribute miracles to those remains, rather their presence had a protective mission.

Nowadays, the threats have changed. In times in which the suitability of being an artist is questioned and under constant attack, the need for a defensive strategy with regard to painting has become evident. Painting risks being converted into a ‘heroic cult’, and the launching of a campaign to search for relics that can protect it can wait no longer. Old things and leftovers owned by still-revered artists, things that can restore faith in the art of painting.

Accordingly, now it is the work space that has been transformed into a place devoted to worshipping idols. The artist-collector’s studio converted into a strong room which safeguards documentation about objects that may have belonged to, or been in contact with, artists. For it is the objects’ relationship with their owners that produces their metamorphosis from ordinary to unique. And their singular status is the reason they are added to this personal archive, which is aided, for the most part, by clues and discoveries found on the Internet and in publications.

Walter Benjamin, in a talk he gave on collecting [1] [24], wrote that collectors are the physiognomists of the world of objects. He goes on to discuss the evocation of images and memories which a collection of his books aroused in him while unpacking after a house removal. And he concludes by saying that, for a collector, ownership is the most intimate relationship that can be had with objects; and this does not imply they come to life inside the collector, but rather that he or she lives inside them. The theory of the “Relic Effect” is derived from this idea.

Throughout history a multitude of cases of false relics, which were revered nevertheless, has been recorded. Despite their dubious authenticity the faithful continued to believe in their magical properties. A similar thing happens when, after a real or virtual pilgrimage, you believe yourself to be in the presence of a famous painter’s palette, stool or bed.

The arrangement of this document archive on the studio walls is reminiscent of the way altars are placed inside sanctuaries. Other objects that may be found on temple walls are ex-votos. When I painted a gouache of Duchamp’s pipe and hung it opposite the table, it became a kind of offering to an indispensable art figure.

The obstinacy of collecting and turning these everyday items into the protagonists of the oeuvre, and doing so today through painting, constitutes an act of resistance against standardization and a way of paying tribute to the masters. A true vindication of creation as an extraordinary experience.”

Teresa Moro

[1] [25] Walter Benjamin Desembalo mi biblioteca. El arte de coleccionar. [Unpacking my Library. A talk about book collecting]. José J. Olañeta Editor, 2012