"Painting, for me, is always an invention - even when it draws from life. It offers a space to alter and reclaim visual narratives, allowing for a personal and complex account of identity, and desire."
Celia Mora’s painting practice draws on the visual language of classical figuration and still life to construct carefully staged worlds rooted in intimacy, power, and authorship. Referencing Spanish Baroque painting and historical modes of narrative representation, Mora reclaims a grand, classical aesthetic as a means of intervening in inherited visual traditions. These references are not nostalgic but strategic, providing a framework through which the artist critically re-examines how bodies, desire, and authority have been historically constructed within Western art.
At the centre of Mora’s work is a feminist interrogation of the gaze. Positioning herself as the painter and her partner as the model, she reverses traditional hierarchies of looking that have long cast women as passive subjects and men as active viewers and artists. Masculinity in her paintings is rendered intimate and unstable - cropped, reflected, distorted, or objectified through glass vessels and polished surfaces. Drawing on feminist and critical theory, including the writings of Laura Mulvey, Ursula K. Le Guin, Norman Bryson, and Roland Barthes, Mora complicates the act of viewing itself, insisting on alternative narratives of power, consent, and desire.
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Fruitful Moment
