On a vacation in Morocco in 1989, the artist Santi Moix spotted a large black water vase strapped to the back of a donkey. “It resembled a giant urn,” Mr. Moix said. “And I was sure it was made of clay. I thought I could see the fingerprints of the maker.”

To Mr. Moix’s amazement, the vase was made out of rubber. The Moroccans wrought the water vessels in shapes reminiscent of classic antiquity but constructed them out of the 20th-century industrial detritus of used rubber tires and bent tacks. “I wanted to learn how to make those vases,” Mr. Moix said. So, between 2005 and 2006, he traveled repeatedly to a remote Islamic community at the base of Marrakesh’s Atlas Mountains. The painter, a native of Barcelona, Spain, who now lives in New York, was on a quest.

As he investigated the origins of the vessels, he found himself drawn into the lives of the people in the region. “I was moved by the community’s fragile order, its precarious existence, and the beauty of the space,” Mr. Moix said. The results of Mr. Moix’s quest — his watercolors, oil paintings, and sculpture — are currently on view at Paul Kasmin Gallery in Chelsea.

The small watercolors are Mr. Moix’s visual records of the buildings, people, and animals living in what became his temporary home, the rural village of Douar Miakh, an hour and a half outside of Marrakesh. On paper, Mr. Moix captures the routines and rhythms of village life: A pot of fish stew, veiled women in an outdoor market, and gaunt donkeys asleep in the midday sun. Forms and colors from these preparatory sketches ultimately migrated to Mr. Moix’s large linen canvases.

Mr. Moix’s inky black pen and ink strokes also captured piles of used tires stored in a lean-to, the workshops for the rubber vases’ production. Mr. Moix befriended the craftsmen, sharing meals and cigars, and enlisted their help to adopt their construction techniques and materials for the creation of his new sculpture. The sturdy, swollen black orbs now on view at the gallery suggest friendly totemic fertility goddesses.

Mr. Moix has made New York City his home for almost two decades. He lives with his American-born wife and their two small children in Carroll Gardens. The oil paint trapped under his fingernails speaks to the long hours he spends in his Manhattan studio. The vivacious brushwork and electric colors of his canvases mirror the eagerness and optimism of their creator, who speaks frankly of the liberating effects of American art on his own working processes and the intimate bonds of family and friendship he has established here. In recent years, Mr. Moix has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship, participated in the Whitney Biennial, and shown his abstract paintings in New York, Tokyo, and Spain.

After his return from Morocco last year, he began work on his large-scale, gently satiric images of a donkey’s backside. Mr. Moix calls his donkeys “my good friends. … They allow me to mix representation and abstraction.” Indeed, the almost-abstract donkeys carry vegetables, fish and fowl, paintbrushes, campfire wood, and, of course, used tires. Forms border on the amorphous and the absurd. There are no outlines in Mr. Moix’s paintings. Instead, shape emerges from sensuous, curvilinear strokes of lavender, lime green, turquoise, and acid orange.

Mr. Moix said he has long been fascinated with donkeys, particularly those depicted in Goya’s “Caprichos.” In Morocco, he observed the rural population’s dependency on the animals and came to appreciate their strength and reliability. “They carry everything, everything that makes us who we are. So I thought to myself, Maybe we can learn something from these animals,” he said. For a man who has cultivated a certain cultural agility and a willingness to leap into the unknown, the lesson became self-reflective. “I realized I use my art,” Mr. Moix said, “to keep moving.”