Catalan artist Morano was born in 1978 in Barcelona’s historic Hospital de Sant Pau to parents who emigrated from Andalusia. Within a year his family relocated from central Barcelona to a working-class suburb on the periphery of the city. Hemmed in by industrial estates and removed from the natural world, drawing and painting emerged as tools for self-exploration and expression.

In the early 90s Morano and a crew of local kids took their drawing and painting onto the streets and also into the empty interiors of abandoned industrial buildings. The vast textured walls of derelict tanneries, textile mills and appliance manufacturing plants became canvases for graffiti inspired by skate culture and vinyl record cover illustrations.

Morano created his first murals at age thirteen incorporating stylised lettering and other typographical symbols, but his focus gradually shifted to the faces of the people who inhabited the declining industrial landscapes: faces that now form an integral part of his fragmented urban scenes, and to whose scars, faults, and frailties he gives poetic life.

To reach the emotional truth of each figure, while alluding to underlying aspirations and dreams, Morano’s compositions always proceed without pre-planning. Instead of imposing a predetermined scheme, Morano’s murals build from the emotional charge guiding each stroke, resulting in surfaces suffused with a musical energy in which discords and syncopations play a significant part.

From the mid 90s to the early 00s Morano’s work appeared regularly in outdoor exhibitions and throughout Europe’s independent street scene publications. A career in graphic design and commercial illustration naturally followed.

Morano is currently Creative Director of the Barcelona-based design firm he founded in 2014. Working remotely from his design studio in Melbourne, Australia, he quietly maintains that he has only ever had one job.