Gabriel Moreno was born in Baena, Spain in 1973 and graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Seville in 1998.
Moreno began his career as an illustrator at several different design studios and advertising agencies in Andalusia. He continued as an illustrator after moving to Madrid in 2004. Moreno was subsequently named among the top 20 new illustrators by Computer Arts magazine in 2007. Since then he has received numerous advertising commissions and is now considered one of the top illustrators in the world. In 2013, Taschen’s publication, 100 Illustrators chose Moreno as one of the one hundred most influential illustrators in advertising during the last decade. He was also chosen to create the cover of “Illustration Now!4”.
Moreno has also created the covers of The Wall Street Journal and is the only illustrator to ever make the cover for the Los Angeles Times. His work has also been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Squire London, GQ USA, The Country Weekly, the Sunday Times and Rolling Stone.
Moreno’s personal artistic work speaks of women’s beauty and sensuality achieved through graphics, elegant black lines and shocks of color. Gabriel’s work can be found in galleries and art fairs worldwide including New York, Singapore, London, Hong Kong, Stockholm and Sydney.
“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.”
Raine Maria Rilke
“My work emerges from a hypersensitivity to the beauty of the female figure, as an attempt to preserve its essence. Being a highly aesthetic work, and born viscerally, it responds to a need for calming an obsession – a strategy for operating as a “civilized Jean-Baptiste Grenouille,” and a vehicle through which I communicate. My ability to express emotions and concepts is directly proportional to my ability to translate them into the skin of the women I draw. Woman – her face, her beauty – is treated superficially throughout the history of humanity, her figure exalted and admired like a porcelain vase. My drawing demonstrates delicacy, strength, sensuality or fragility as a value ; as a canvas in which all realms, both sensorial and intellectual, manifest my only way of seeing and making sense of the world – through a woman.
Images and ideas need contrast, and by drawing in black and white my visual language is confined to shadow and light. Conceptual contrasts are furthered by subject matter and aesthetic contradictions, expressed in two levels of reading: pencil lines that show beauty and hide fragility, fear, ephemeron, sensuality, and tattoo lines, coursing through the skin of the figure and revealing what its beauty hides.
My creative process begins with simple, easy lines of pencil or pen, or clay modeling, that continuously take shape until they become a female figure. My inspiration and work tools have created a world of urban and contemporary women, living between the roughness of their tattoos and the finesse of their elegant outlines. These lines draw women in black and white, and evolve into colors that cover their skin, conveying sensations that range from seduction to obsession – tattoos that stand out with color amidst white, delicate bodies invoking emptiness.”
