José Morraja, Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the Universtity of Valencia; further studies in countries
like France and Germany.
He
combines artistic projects in fields like photography, video and
installations with commercial work related to fashion and advertising,
including video projects for brands and companies. He has been an art
director for music ensembles, festivals, events and interdisciplinary
projects.
José Morraja considers photography and video as the starting point for the creation of new contemporary dialogs in fashion, music and art; he is always willing to work, experiment and evolve.
José Morraja considers photography and video as the starting point for the creation of new contemporary dialogs in fashion, music and art; he is always willing to work, experiment and evolve.
Explaining ones own work
has never been easy. Specially when you look at your different works
from another perspective as the time goes by. I consider my artistic
trajectory as a constant impulse to understand myself, my environment
and my time. My different projects don’t follow any particular evolution
because they are based on my own evolution as an individual. All the
work and research I have done have been focused on understanding
different moments of my personal and social life, that have gone through
quite different stages. I see my work as a sort of diary where I have
tried to transform my gut feelings into a visual and conceptual dialog
to have a better understanding on contemporary human contradictions.
My artistic projects have
always tried to reflect the struggle between the individual and society.
Concepts like social success, the importance of the image or the
constant search for change and novelty have turned into the motor that
drives our lives, ambitions and dreams towards one objective: happiness.
My projects analyze those
values through very diverse disciplines like photography, video,
installations, etc. where my characters adopt very different social
structures to reveal how artificial they are and how these concepts
transform our own reality as individuals.
You can easily appreciate
the passing of time and a change of attitude towards life and society in
my work, from a more radical and adolescent period to a more calmed and
mature one, sometimes with melancholy and others with curiosity.
I started my artistic
trajectory under these premises in 2001, working on the analysis of what
I called the “Star Generation”: a new teenage generation (like myself
at that time) that has rejected the traditional values and only cares
for the present while ignoring the past and the future. In this
environment the social characters have lost any sense of effort and
sacrifice as everything is based on pure hedonism.
Discotheques, brands and
the image have become the only possible reality, the only way of being
accepted and, at the same time, to stand out in a society based on
appearances. This is how artificiality is taken as a legitimate
territory of appropriation and creation of new discourses to understand
themselves better within a social identity.
With my series “Lost in
Paradise” (Lucas Carrieri Art Gallery 2010, Berlin) I open a new stage
under the direct influence of contemporary international events that
reflected how unreal a dream was, changing the way we see society and
ourselves.
My last projects witness
our own fiction. The characters have been replaced by simple carton
representations of themselves: silent main characters looking for new
dialogs about society, human relationships and about their own feelings.
Imagination and fantasy
become the ideal tool to build a new dialectic of reality that will
slowly transform carton into flesh and fiction into a new way of
understanding ourselves.
