Tell us a little about yourself and what you do.
My name is Emilio Morales and I was born in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico, in 1996. I have a degree in Visual Arts from the University of Guanajuato and I’m currently a professor of sculpture and other three-dimensional subjects at the Allende Institute in San Miguel de Allende. I founded the Neotortilleria project with Roberto Delgadillo, it was an independent exhibition space, where we developed curatorial projects, and a personal interest in curatorship was born.

Are there any influences that are core to your work?
The landscape, the sky, the sounds of nature, as well as disorder, jammed music, the synthetic, the toxic, the internet and clouds.

How were you introduced to the mediums that you work with?
My father is a sculptor and painter and my grandfather was one too, I grew up with that, I grew up with a hammer in one hand and a grinder in the other, working with sheet metal and cement, my father has taught me a lot about techniques.

I grew up among the cement dust of my father’s work and the sensitivity and tranquility of my mother in the field and that is what shapes my work now.

I learned a lot about the world from Paula while we were colleagues at Uni, from Roberto about culture in general and painting, also from Gabo about sculptural materials and techniques.

I learn a lot from the people around me who share with me.

What kind of imagery are you drawn to?
I am very attracted to pointed images, such as neo-goth, neo-tribal, I also like memes that are understood only by the image itself, I am very attracted to pictures of the sky, of the forest and photos where one can be aware of the immensity of nature and the landscape.

I also like images of everyday life intervened by digital means, such as vectors or lines of movement in video programs, or like when cameras detect people’s faces in public cameras and frame them in a frame that appears and disappears, I like images of darkness with flash, images that have light and you can see the flashes of the sun between the leaves of the trees or as a reflection in the water.

Your work often includes or references ready-made objects. When you look for material for your work, what attracts you?
I am very attracted to the function of sculpture because I manage to understand it as if it were alchemy, a transformation of materials and interpretations of the objects. The last pieces I worked on were the pair of Nike Air Max Plus sneakers, which are made of aluminum and are a representation of contemporary culture, which is also very important in my work. I literally made a mold of my sneakers (which by the way I still use even when they are full of silicone) and in particular that model of Nikes is very representative of the culture of crime in countries like Spain, Italy and France and is linked to a stereotype of the clothing of young people who work selling drugs or committing crimes. My contribution to this is precisely speaking from a different country about this stereotype, since fashion works in parallel to art or is even faster than art. And the interest in immortalizing these objects in aluminum is to take advantage of the opportunities that materials currently offer us in sculpture; such as 3D printing, silicones, molds, resins, etc.

Is there a moment that you remember that was decisive for your identity as an artist?
Yes, there was a time when I felt like my artwork could be done by anyone, I had nothing of myself, I had no identity and I was worried, then I had a tragic moment in my life where I was 3 months in depression and where my artistic production decreased considerably, I stopped painting and started working with cast aluminum.

What role does the environment play in your work?
The environment is something that I discovered pretty recently, when I didn’t know what to propose as an artist, maybe I went for an easy strategy of working with my environment, but I didn’t demand more of myself and I realized that it’s my thing, trying to perceive images of my environment, digest it in my head and bring them out into a sculpture, a digital image or a drawing. In my work there are representations of the plenitude that the landscape between San Miguel (the city where I was born) and Guanajuato (the city where I live in now) provokes in me, the two cities where I live, and that moment, that 1 hour journey is my environment and it’s what I capture in my work, it’s where I nourished everything in addition to my social environment such as parties or get-togethers, talks and information that are my friends and my boyfriend.

How does your design brand Retvull interact with your artistic practice? What is the idea of slow design in your work?
That is a very nice question that I sometimes find difficult to answer. I started retvull with more commercial intentions than my own artistic work. While I was studying at university, there was a strange feeling from the teacher’s perspective about our work being commercialized, and I used to like that, but times have changed and I like to live off my art. Likewise, my art has also changed to adapt to a context of galleries, art fairs and exhibitions in general, but always maintaining what is genuine and being honest in my personal proposals. So retvull is my pretext to market my work directly, to work on objects that do not need to be understood in context, they are for a different public than the one who bought my work, because my work has a more personal setting and it’s my entire environment digested and captured in a piece of my work.

On the other hand, retvull is a mirror brand, where I make small series and it is not necessary to explain them and they only ask me for 2 or 3, I sell them and that’s it. The idea of slow design is a reference taken from slow fashion, which is the opposite of a very commercial fashion brand, such as Levi’s, Nike, Adidas, etc. Slow fashion works by reusing materials from discarded clothing or by creating them, but in small series and not in mass, they do not make series of more than 5 or 10 pieces, most of the slow fashion pieces are unique or limited. And retvull works in that way with its designs, it is something I do to keep it close to art and try to maintain the same essence. I have more jobs besides being an artist and retvull, I teach sculpture classes at a university and time does not allow me to dedicate myself to making long productions of retvull, so I keep it healthy and work at my own pace. Sometimes by commission or sometimes I make small series; 80% of retvull’s works are unique pieces and the other 20% are runs of 5 identical or similar pieces.

How do you balance tending to the variety of responsibilities in the work you do? How do you mitigate burnout or exhaustion?
It’s a bit complicated, my work has distanced me in the last few months from the things that really interest me, my partner, my family, my friends, and it has been difficult for me to get off that workflow and decrease that intensity because, as an artist, one always feels the need to participate in all the invitations and take advantage of all the opportunities to work, at least I do and I feel somewhat obligated because I feel that my future and the future of my career as an artist depend on doing just that.

Talking more about the exhaustion part, it seems heavy to me because I have a part-time job as a sculpture professor at the University of my city, I also have a job at the public library in my city, another job is my own artistic production job and I also have to invest time in my retvull design project, I don’t have much time to rest, or to focus 100 percent on everything with those 4 jobs.

I love all my jobs and I do them with great pleasure, but I would like to have more stability and be able to take advantage of things that I haven’t taken advantage of for a long time, the people who love me and who I love more than anything. I love art, but it’s wearing me out. I have to be thankful that I can make a living from art and all my work is art-related.

What is your current studio or workspace like? Do you have any ritual when you work in there?
Yes, I have a ritual, whenever I finish a day of work I leave everything out of place. So when I start my day in my studio I put on Soundcloud and see if any friend has posted a new mix and if not I put on what the app recommends or songs I already downloaded, then now I start cleaning up from the day before, I arrange my tools and clear my tables. When I finish doing that, I am a person who likes liquids a lot so I make coffee, sometimes I take a Monster energy drink, juice, beer or water. I like to procrastinate a little bit before on the internet and after that I get to work.

I am not a person who works a lot with sketches or drawing, but if I do, I only do it in broad strokes, if I am going to make a sculpture I make a couple of sketches and that’s it; my sculpture is always done by sculpting and in a somewhat improvised way.

How does your current creative community compare to when you were younger?
Well, I have kept myself surrounded by the same people. I like to see how they have their own rhythm and that none of them make you feel pressured to change your way of making art or consuming it. I find it interesting that everyone from my close art social circle is addicted to consuming art and talking about it all the time. My boyfriend and my closest friends studied art and it is a very nourishing context all the time, because we stay up to date.

Something that has changed, I think, has been the maturity of our personal production in a very natural way, and I find it curious how the things that interest us have been the same and only the artistic context has been accepting them more and that is part of modifying the local culture. We live in Guanajuato city and there’s a very small context of contemporary art compared to bigger cities like Guadalajara or Mexico City, but they are environments where we also move around and that have been shaping us and making us part of the current culture in Mexico.

Do you take into account the reception of your work while making it?
Until recently, when I was invited to work with a couple of galleries, I realized that the art market does manage to skew my main intentions when producing, although I think that those main intentions have also been shaped by “international” art, which is what I call what can be produced from any mind, it can be produced anywhere in the world, something I like to brag about is that my work lately has been working with the sky and toxicity, and the sky is one of the most accepted works of art in the art market besides being the most international concept, the sky may not be the same everywhere in the world but the same sky that I see in Guanajuato may resemble one in Europe, or in Asia, sometimes there are variations but I think it is a very general concept with a fairly broad identity, I must be responsible when working on my work from there, it can be produced anywhere in the world although it is not like that, and I like that, it makes me think about the uniqueness of human thought and mine is deformed by my consumption of art in galleries, Instagram, magazines, criticism and everything that informs me about art. I have a local joke that I tell in Mexico and from what I see in Mexico that says: The concept of BlueSky is the step that must be taken before entering art fairs, galleries and the art market in general.

The funny thing is that I’m not sure which came first, whether the art market adopting these new aesthetics or the new aesthetics shaping the art market. I like to think that they go hand in hand and that my work has not been modified by the art market, but rather, that my work and the work of other people I admire have been modifying the art market.

What would you like to see more of in your world or in your community?
I would like to see or hear or read more art critics. I think the local context in my city is so small that we have to be careful to express or honestly express our opinions about other works. Among friends that works fine but with other artists, not always. We haven’t tried much either, but it seems that there is an unwritten rule of “respecting” our positions and by respecting, I mean not questioning them. I would like for that type of shame to disappear, it’s not necessary. I would like to see more criticism.

Is there any area of your practice that you are interested in exploring more? Any new material or process that you are excited to use?
Yes, when I started in art I painted and stopped doing it. I would like to take up drawing and painting again, I feel like I need to work a little slower, I love aluminum and stone, but today I feel a little tired of not being able to let that go. I need a break. I don’t know what I want to paint or how to do it, but I’m excited to feel that I want to do it.

Also, 3D modeling and making digital environments is something that has interested me for a long time. Like when you’re in a video game in the jungle and you come to a lake or a river surrounded by trees, humidity and small plants where a ray of light enters through the treetops, that’s something I would have always liked to know how to do. Create a full and calm digital space.

What do you collect?
I collect and steal photographs of the sky, photos of clouds.

I have a medium-sized archive of screenshots as well as images that I see on the internet that have to do with the aesthetics of technologies, like devices that seem to be angelic.