About

Carmen Morillo's work springs from an impulse, an energy that seeks to channel itself into matter: ideas of images, orders and structures that become painting. It is a self-sustaining process, in which making generates the desire to keep making. Creation serves no utilitarian purpose and follows no conventional paths; it is a deep necessity that keeps the inner balance of the person who practices it.

Many of her ideas are first developed in three-dimensional space. She builds small, ephemeral structures from cardboard, paper and disposable materials, modifying, moving and observing them until they generate a plastic tension: a precise relationship between color, volume, plane, texture and space. These models are not the final object but a field of experimentation, whose weights and balances are later transferred to painting.

She often starts from recognizable elements, although her gaze tends to move the forms away from their immediate identity. The figurative remains as a point of entry, while perception shifts toward the structural relationships within the whole. She is interested in that intermediate place where an image retains a recognizable memory yet begins to behave like an abstract scheme.

This pursuit rests on a relationship with matter that is both physical and spiritual. She conceives the image from a symbolic background in which the material and the invisible coexist. She is 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 the material and the intensity of the color, she finds a kind of absolute: a sense of abundance, fullness and availability.

Her career does not follow a continuous presence in the conventional professional circuit. For years, her priority was the attention, care and support of family life, a commitment incompatible with the outward projection of an artistic career. Far from being an interruption, her practice remained active within the domestic space, with the same rigor and validity as any other research. Motherhood did not change the way she looks, but it added concrete content to her imagination and led her to fully inhabit the present.

With experience we tend to classify and stop being surprised, yet the possibilities of perception are never exhausted. Carmen does not seek a definitive version of an image, but rather to test how far a visual experience can extend. The same motif or symbol can remain almost intact while the relationships that constitute it multiply.

For her, creating is a way of being in the world: a space where thought, sensory experience and the transcendent come together, keeping open the possibility that what we already know may be revealed to us once again.