Let’s get Digital

Antonio Mora’s mind-blowing portrait compositions challenge viewers’ imagination and posit innovative statements on the use of digital photography.

The brave new world brought about by the amazing development of technology has also been the source of new forms of art, offering countless and unexpected possibilities. Digital photography and the tools associated to it have triggered explorations which have resulted in awesome artworks within totally innovative fields.

This, in turn, has fired the imagination and creativity of talented photographers and artists coming from different media for the benefit of the arts community which has, thereby, widened the scope of its possibilities. Antonio Mora, a Spanish photographer based in Elche, near Alicante in eastern Spain, not far from Valencia, formerly an art director and artist, is a good example of how far innovation in such areas can contribute to the creation of new art forms.

His intriguing photographs challenge viewers’ imagination, in so far as he fuses standard portraits with landscapes, animals, plants or buildings in unlikely and surprising combinations, which inevitably arrest our attention and prompt the creation of fantastic stories or fiction worlds.

Mora’s often disturbing works are deeply evocative and can easily trap spectators in their own inner worlds, by interacting with their most secret wishes, memories and/or dreams. Quite adequately going under the title of “Dream Portraits”, one of his most recent series skilfully blends faces with landscapes or cityscapes in a uniquely oneiric way, giving them an inescapable aura of mystery.

Antonio Mora’s artworks display a strongly expressive power which challenges the limits of viewers’ imagination. Often resorting to the use of black and white for a more dramatic effect, he also uses carefully chosen colours so as to enhance, in each of his works, the particular emotions he intends to disclose. Mora obviously relies on his viewers’ memories and dreams to interact with his portraits and inconspicuously opens up the Pandora box of hidden secrets and wishes in each of us, thereby disturbing our most private thoughts and feelings.

 Antonio Mora’s mind-blowing portraits “play with opacity and composition (...) [to find] a likeness in unlikely pairs”, which assign them with a strong visual power evoking a “sort of transitioning or in-between phase of consciousness” that captures everyone in their thought-provoking, unusual beauty.