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Dream no. 17 (I Was Here Before)
Original title: Sueño n.º 17 (I Was Here Before)
1993
Dry grass
Dimensions: Variable dimensions: 3,200 x 44 cm (approx.)
Reference: ACF0048
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Around 1992, Mora embarked on a series of works which were entitled "Dreams" and which he eventually numbered over a period of time. If his work has always shown a clear inclination to incorporate mental processes and visions coming from the subconscious, in the dreams series he enters his own dream world as a way of experiment and a starting point for dramatising sensations.
In this work, Sueño nº 17 (I Was Here Before), Mora investigates the materialisation, the "capacity for reality", of visions from the dream world.
About his creative process, the writer Keith Seward writes that he does not cultivate dreams as the Surrealists did, nor does he try to filter them by drawing them from his own subconscious… through automatism, meditation of hallucination. When he has a dream, he restricts himself to jotting it down in a notebook. And frequently one of them becomes the basis for a work. For example, he saw walls covered with moss in a dream, which inspired the work Sueño núm. 25, in which panels covered with mushrooms are erected in the gallery. As a result, when he "realises" the dream in a work of art, he transforms it, expands it, analyses it in a very similar way to how data are analysed by a scientist. The use Mora makes of dreams is therefore very different from that of the Surrealists: he does not cultivate them, he interprets them.
In this Sueño nº 17, the subtitle "I was here before" gives us a glimpse of a reference to a dejà-vu typical of a subconscious reality. He places a strip of dry grass, like a carpet, that runs down a flight of stairs and part of the adjacent floor. The inner vision the artist had had in his mind is transformed, in the room, with the argument of its reality, of the investigation of a material in contrast to the context in which it is set, which undoubtedly also illustrates the very essence of dreams, which are invariably situated outside the limits of the "established", of the "agreed". In that way Mora offers a double reading: he investigates the constitution of the unreal whilst simultaneously, almost scientifically, analysing the nature of that unreality in the sphere of the visible, of the artistic.
