The artist lives and works in Nice… and in Second Life. “To be an artist from the South of France is to create a Mediterranean art where the artist asserts their presence without guilt, where the human does not fade away.” An artist who is out of sync with the conventional and always surprises. He practices an art that is not reduced to an idea or a style but multiplies into a branching of total freedom. He evolves from pseudo-naive painting to abstract art, from monumental steel sculpture to ceramics, from installations to performances, from photography to synthesized images on canvas or in film, from social evenings to techno nights.
Visual artist, performer, and digital artist, Patrick MOYA is ubiquitous and visionary, erecting large steel sculptures in Asia or shaping ceramics in clay in Italy with the letters of his name, shifting from brush to computer, from techno parties to the walls of a chapel, from contemporary art to digital art, from real life to virtual worlds…
His unique and recurring approach is the infinite variation of the four letters M.O.Y.A. in his work.
Born in 1955 in Troyes to parents of Spanish origin, Patrick MOYA studied art at the Villa Arson in Nice (1974-1977), where he created the magazine “le Reptile au style” (a comic fanzine, in the years 1977-78), before posing nude as a model at the Beaux-Arts (1979-1989) to become the “creature and not the creator,” while reflecting on the artist’s place in the contemporary world.
He read McLuhan and questioned with him the changes brought to art history and the new media: “with the media of ubiquity, like live television, the creator no longer has time to tell the history of art; to exist, he must become a creature.”
He began by creating works in the 1980s solely with the letters of his name, assimilating the work with his signature, before marking images from the dictionary with his name, and finally, creating his character (1997), an offset self-portrait soon surrounded by an almost human bestiary, which together form the world of MOYA, his MOYA LAND.
He now owns several virtual islands on Second Life, earning him recognition by Italian critic Mario Gerosa as one of the pioneers of virtual universes. He designs his island in 3D as a comprehensive artwork: the creator has finally become a creature under the name of his avatar, Moya Janus, who welcomes visitors by immersing them in his universe. This island is the culmination of an invasive process turned immersive.
Now also recognized as a digital artist, he participates in the virtual Renaissance: this was at least the title of the first major exhibition of SL artists, held in 2009 in the Anthropology Museum of the city of the Italian Renaissance, Florence, where an entire room was dedicated, already, to the Moya Civilization.
In 2011, with the release of the Catalogue Raisonné by ArtstoArts editions, a new Moya Civilization emerged – this time painted on canvas stretched on the walls of the La Malmaison art center in Cannes: a 90-meter-long by 4-meter-high fresco-installation narrating his artistic journey.
From the beginning (the creature expelled from paradise) to virtualization (the creature finally reaching virtual paradise) while passing through the various stages faced — the masked creature, freed from its strings, who writes its name, tries to cross the medium, to recreate the Universe… The Moya installation: a custom-made challenge for this generous artist now in the full maturity of his talent.
