About

I am Carmen Morillo and, among other things, I am a painter.

I paint because there is an impulse within me, an energy that needs to be channelled by transforming ideas, images, orders, and structures into matter. It is a self-perpetuating act: creating generates an even greater desire to create. Creation does not respond to a utilitarian purpose, nor does it need to follow conventional paths; it is a profound necessity, the force that keeps my inner world in balance.

My work often originates in the three-dimensional realm, where I construct small ephemeral structures using cardboard, paper, and disposable materials. I modify them, move them, and observe them until they generate a visual tension that interests me: a specific relationship between colour, volume, plane, texture, and space. These models are not the final object but rather a territory of experimentation whose weights and balances I later transfer into painting.

I often begin with recognisable elements, yet my gaze tends to distance forms from their immediate identity. The figurative remains as an entry point, while perception shifts towards the purely structural relationships within the whole. I am interested in that intermediate place where an image retains a recognisable memory but begins to behave as an abstract scheme.

This search is grounded in a relationship with matter that is at once deeply physical and profoundly spiritual. I conceive the image from a symbolic background where the material and the invisible coexist. I am drawn to pigments for their concentration and fullness. The format of oil sticks, their cylindrical shape, their greasy texture, their fragility beneath a thin dry skin, produces a pleasure that belongs as much to the body as to contemplation. In the density of raw material and the intensity of colour I find a kind of absolute: a sensation of abundance, fullness, and availability.

My trajectory is not defined by a continuous presence within the conventional professional circuit. For many years, my priority was devoted to the care, construction, and support of family life, a commitment whose demands were incompatible with the outward projection of an artistic career. Far from constituting a hiatus, my practice remained active within the domestic sphere, pursued with the same rigour, perseverance, and validity as any other form of research. Motherhood did not alter my way of seeing, but it brought specific content to my imagination and confronted me with the need to inhabit the present fully.

As we accumulate experience, we tend to classify and cease to be surprised. Yet the possibilities of perception are inexhaustible. For this reason, I repeat: I am not seeking a definitive version of an image, but rather to discover how far a visual experience can extend. The same motif or symbol may remain almost unchanged while the relationships.