Have you ever seen the meme of a particularly creepy image that is followed by a text that reads ‘Enough Internet for today’ ? Well, it’s obvious that Marco Mori has considered a million and one times how his videos end up becoming memes. Which makes perfect sense because, at the end of the day, this 3D artist specialises in exploring the limits of both the human body and that of synthetic graphics generated by technological tools.
Marco Mori: post-human, but with a touch of humour
Marco Mori’s world is full of disturbing creatures whose bodies continuously challenge the laws of human coherence. It is a post-human world, but a post-human world that is also full of mockery
For example, there are a few significant cases where Marco Mori overlapped disturbing textures onto the video of the banger Soju by Jay Park y 2 Chainz. And he must have enjoyed the experience because as of lately he has animated solid objects that are liquefied in The Thugger Hugger’s clip Chanel (go get it). Moreover, he has a series of projects where he experiments with the limits of the Nike Swoosh because the Just Do It slogan becomes very inviting coming from the brand itself. And then there are the artworks where he just works on purely for leisure purposes, and these are the weirdest of them all. You can find an apparently extremely hot guy who has two bald heads for boobs which he plays with as if they were bongos, a hilarious version of Wrecking Ball by Miley Cyrus, or two naked women with a nightmarish appearance hugging each other to the beat of Unbreak My Heart by Toni Braxton while their heads are being inflated and deflated at the same time.
The recurring themes of his work have already been mentioned: naked bodies with breasts –normally unequal– as the only sexual attribute, ultratexturised skin full of imperfections, absolute disdain towards the use of 3D to create an illusion of reality (in fact, Mori works in the opposite direction) and, as the cherry on top, he uses comical music as a counterpoint to create humour that makes his own work even that more nuanced. The music, in fact, is what deviates his 3D art from the sordidness from other bodies of work which would normally be considered similar, like those by Chris Cunningham o Jesse Kanda. These references make it very clear that, even though up until now Marco Mori has been working with hip-hop artists, whenever he starts working with the likes of Aphex Twins or Arca, he’ll explode into the scene like no other.
And just as Mori himself has been quoted with saying before, what he does is absolutely self-taught art. He learned to use the Cinema 4D software by following online tutorials, and his only previous experience has been on a series of videos he had made using Windows Movie Maker in which he portrayed his passion for sports like football or skateboarding. The link between his past and present is very clear: these two sports, in particular, have a lot to do with the human body and the limits of this, confronting it to situations that may deform it, they break and challenge the laws of physics. That is what Marco Mori does in his 3D pieces, no matter how hard he tries to admit that his love for using unfit chubby bodies comes from the fact that it is much easier to work with these type of physiques on 3D terms. Pure laziness, of course.
Are we in front of the next hero for those who are fas of post-humanity? Yes, it’s more than likely. But, be careful, because Marco Mori’s career has just started, and if he continues to apply the Just Do It mentality in such an eloquent manner, the barriers he’ll be able to break won’t cease to continuously amaze us.