Artists: MOTS

Original Artworks from the Artist duo MOTS  

These works are included in the Territory exhibition at Armazem Das Artes Alcobaca

The exhibition text for the artist is included below: 

MOTS

Diogo Ruas, b. 1986, Lisbon, Portugal & Jagoda Cierniak, b. 1989, Opole, Poland
SHARED AUTHORSHIP

Diogo Ruas and Jagoda Cierniak have worked together as MOTS since 2017. Their different backgrounds, Diogo in painting and illustration and Jagoda in photography and cultural projects, bring different ways of seeing into the collaboration. Together, they have developed a practice that moves between observation, photography, painting and abstraction.

Recognizable subjects often provide an anchor within MOTS' compositions. Flowers, fruit, vessels, plants and other familiar forms are fractured through a language that can feel both painterly and digital, sometimes borrowing the blocky forms of 8-bit graphics and early video games. Shapes break apart, scales shift and recognizable objects meet more amorphic forms.

Bringing these multiple styles together within a single composition has become a distinct part of MOTS' visual language. That language moves across paintings, murals, installations and sculpture, changing with different materials, scales and spaces. In their public work, architecture can also influence what the work becomes. MOTS respond to openings, divisions and structures already present, allowing the place itself to enter the composition.

Their work is built through this kind of exchange, between the two artists, between different visual languages, and between the artwork and the space around it.

This Territory is SHARED AUTHORSHIP.

With MOTS, collaboration is not simply a division of labour. Ideas and gestures pass back and forth, changing along the way. Photography can initiate painting. Still life can blend with amorphic abstraction. Space and place can become contributors.