The Philadelphia Art Alliance at University of the Arts is pleased to present one-person exhibitions by Gracie Devito, Merlin James and Gabriel de la Mora that revolve around a new sensibility of abstracted landscape. These three global artists have never exhibited in Philadelphia before. Each has arrived at these works from individualized tactics that variously confront the history of representation while acknowledging the materiality and construction of images.

Gracie DeVito’s paintings come from a history of performance. Her paintings have the effect of the fairy tales limned by Nabis painters; their rippled edges betray their origins, often painted on utilitarian painter’s cloth instead of artist’s linen. Yet they have none of the aura of Arte Povera, and it is DeVito’s elegant sense of color that elevates the work. The paintings are accented with brilliant punctal passages—daubed, stained and drawn back into with coy figurative and vegetal references. DeVito balances (in)formal shape concerns with elements of schematic depictions surrounding most works by sinuous frames that capture and echo the support’s contours. They are somewhat whimsical without deceiving the viewer.

The paintings of Merlin James are also subtly radical in their own terms. His personal color sensibility is at times solemn, at others brightly exuberant. He works on a variety of surfaces whose textures have a great effect on his paint touch and attack. In some works, the stretcher bars may be visible through translucent supports. In other paintings, the outside contour of the canvases bows away from traditional rectangular modes. James often physically pierces the picture plane with the negative space punctuating towards pictorial ends. Neither wholly figurative nor adverse to abstraction, James, in effect, advances Western representational canon while deconstructing its illusionist heritage.

Gabriel de la Mora is a conceptual artist more than a painter, per se. Each of his projects incorporates constructing images from found, discarded and obsolete objects such as eggshells, shoe soles, speaker screens and feathers from which the Mexican artist creates minimal monochrome-looking surfaces of great technical complexity, conceptual rigor and embedded information. In this current series, de la Mora has gathered flea market landscape paintings that he exposes to the elements and the extreme heat of the sun on Mexico City rooftops. As the pigments degrade, often barely adhering to the canvas, the physical pixelation of craquelure filters our comprehension. We are implicated in the process of recognizing default representational clichés but also the fate of our planet under climate stress.

https://www.uarts.edu/gallery/gracie-devito-gabriel-de-la-mora-merlin-james

Psychotropical

by Marcello Dantas

Morpho didius is a species of neotropical butterfly. It is large, with wings that are a rich blue on top and have distinct eyespots underneath. These butterflies have a very specific genetic code that draws their identity. Their genes also provide instructions on how and where to migrate, thereby defining their territory. There is a tropical wisdom in every butterfly and each one conveys a message to the next generation.

I have always been fascinated by the way artists’ processes can reveal things they themselves were not aware of before. Gabriel de la Mora develops his work by piecing together small fragments of materials ranging from eggshells to butterfly wings. His obsessive practice produces new, extraordinary surfaces. From a distant point of view, it may seem that the original act is the schematic mind that formats resemblances into difference. If we go beyond the surface, however, two concepts emerge very clearly. First, the original act is in fact the fracture imposed on an object, like breaking an egg, cracking a mirror, or dissecting a butterfly. The fracture produces the potential drawing that the artist will then seek out with his obsessive repetition of trying to find the original essence in its fragment. It is this search for a new whole within the torn, traumatized fragment that makes his artistic process so special. Spaces between things create the opportunity for newness.

Most of the materials he uses carry a genetic code, for example, the one that causes many kinds of butterflies to produce eye spots on the surfaces of their wings. All eggs are similar, but no two are identical. So, to be sure there is a mystery already encoded in the material. One can even find this aspect in minerals, as when De la Mora approaches obsidian, a volcanic glass that has two aspects: a solid matte surface and a black mirrored surface. These materials all have ancestral uses in Mesoamerican cultures, yet they allow for a completely new contemporary reading. Doubt serves as the raw material when we don’t recognize the elements of an artwork.

The first piece I ever encountered by Gabriel de La Mora was a drawing he had made using thin strands of human hair. Human hair is fantastic evidence of identity, revealing everything from a person’s DNA to their nutrition. At the same time, using it to draw seemed like an impossible task, one that could only be done by someone with an obsessive mind. But De la Mora is not only obsessive; he is also dyslexic, capable of writing perfectly backwards as only a mirrored image could do. In every repetition, even of an intentional act, something different occurs.

I have a habit of challenging artists to create a work that would be relevant to species other than humans. When De la Mora presents us with a field of eyes, no one immediately recognizes where they come from. Repetition, difference, and patterns resemble the production of a language. If these works were to become the only evidence of human existence for an extraterrestrial, they would pose a question: what is the code that informs them? Would they look for a Rosetta Stone to interpret that pattern into some sort of message? My guess is that they would, and that they would find something. Just as an acid trip produces similar effects on people’s minds, or the rhythmic beat of electronic music triggers certain hormonal responses in us, the repeating patterns in Gabriel de la Mora’s work may produce a certain type of psychedelic experience.

Between his obsessive practice and the coherence of being a butterfly an encounter may occur and that is the place of art: to reveal something we cannot address in any other way. A psychotropical language emerges between the flight of a butterfly and the light of an artist. We just have to accept our humble ignorance when it comes to knowing how to decode it, just as when we hear a foreign language without knowing any of the words, we can still pick up on rhythm, pitch, and volume, and grasp the subliminal essence of the message. If we accept the psychotropic experience in these works, we may not need a Rosetta Stone to understand them.

https://www.proyectosmonclova.com/exhibitions-gallery/psicotropical

https://leaflet.perrotin.com/view/173/lepidoptera

The Lepidoptera Demon

 Butterflies are known for their delicacy and discreet charm, qualities enhanced through a capacity to keep unnoticed: It is astounding how little an ordinary person notices butterflies.[1]

Despite their colorful wings, which fast and concise movements perhaps would only allow us to get a glimpse on the elaborate patterns, designs, and chromatic combinations that some species display. Like other organisms, butterflies are prone to mimicry. They can resemble a flower, a tree or look like fallen leaves in the northern autumn or in the tropical rain forest. Their unassumed beauty and familiarity can transform a solitary spot in a forest into a site for spiritual introspection and delight. It is not accidental that the angel of death was represented by the Gnostics as a winged foot stepping on a butterfly. Psyche, the Greek goddess represented through butterfly wings, prompted psychoanalysis’ interpretation of lepidoptera as symbols of resurgence.[2] Butterflies also dwell on Mesoamerican iconography, in particular the Mexica of Tenochtitlan, which considered them as the fleeting souls of deceased warriors.

Beyond the realms of natural sciences and entomology, lengthy literature on lepidoptera proves their aesthetic allure and symbolic potency as the paradoxical insects with wings that they are. From opera to social sculpture, butterflies inspired metaphoric interpretations that transcend the binary model of gender and sexuality as well as the polarities of life and death.[3] Martin Johnson Heade represented a Blue Morpho type in perhaps one of the most arresting paintings ever made of a living butterfly in which two of its wings, expose a singular iridescence while the other ones, slightly bent towards the left, were depicted in black as if they belong to the afterlife. The background shows a fantastic landscape that leads us to the equinoctial regions so keen to the nineteenth century art travelers influenced by Alexander von Humboldt.[4] But as Vladimir Nabokov observed, butterflies are largely unnoticed by people.  Nabokov, who suffered a severe pneumonia at a very young age, lost his “monstrous gift of numbers that had made me a child prodigy during a few months (today I cannot multiply 13 by 17 without a pencil and paper; I can add them up, though, in a trice, the teeth of the three fitting in neatly); but the butterflies survived (…)” According to the writer, a year later he “gained absolute control over the European lepidoptera as known to Hoffmann.”[5]

Intriguingly, artist Gabriel de la Mora showed an unusual disposition to play with language at a very young age. Comparable to Nabokov’s gift of numbers and his skills to solve complicated mathematical operations, which the Russian American writer characterized rather as “a demon”, de la Mora can read straightforwardly a sentence backwards and disorganize a word to compose an instant riddle. Dyslexia prompted him to perceive words as images, fragments in magnified dimensions: “cuando no entiendes la información que tienes enfrente o que escuchas, inmediatamente se convierten en imágenes, en fragmentos, en ruido, en sonidos y en un sinfín de cosas que no tienen nada que ver con la realidad de los contenidos o las cosas (…) Veo las letras y los números de una forma diferente, me fascinan ambos y siempre he visto a las letras, los números, las palabras y las matemáticas de una forma diferente.” [1]

De la Mora’s early works after graduating from the Pratt Institute were under the spell of language as a problem to be solved through visual forms and transitional objects. More recently, he dedicated his artistic investigation to renovate the language of modernist abstraction using bodily elements such as human hair for his Capilares non-representational drawings, and egg shelves, feathers, and butterfly wings to compose geometric, monochromatic, or hard-edge paintings.[2]

Gabriel de la Mora’s new Lepidoptera series composed of thirty-three works made of eight different species of butterflies, seem to complete a cycle of difference in which the artist merged modernist lessons by Joseph Albers with his own propensity to isolate fragments as compositional elements for transforming images into a scribbled discourse. If the Mexica mythologies added a cultural layer to De la Mora’s formal endeavor of bringing the opalescence of butterflies to abstract painting, their unnoticed beauty appealed as a language in which color always hides the nature of the element that you see. Mimicry is their “demon” or to put it in words by Roger Caillois: “it is not the presence of the elements what is perplexing and decisive, it is their mutual organization, their reciprocal topography.”[3]

Gabriela Rangel
Independent writer and curator based in Brooklyn

https://www.perrotin.com/exhibitions/gabriel_de_la_mora_-lepidoptera/7625

https://leaflet.perrotin.com/view/173/lepidoptera

[1] Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory. An Autobiography Revisited. Vintage International, New York, 1989
[2] J.E Cirlot, Diccionario de símbolos. Editorial Siruela, Madrid, 2011. p. 306-307
[3] It’s been stated that the Parangoles (wearable paintings) by Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica were influenced by his collaboration as a research assistant to his father’s work as a distinguished entomologist. The young Oiticica classified specimens and performed other tasks.
[4] Blue Morpho Butterfly (1863-64), Christal Bridges Museum Collection.
[5] Op. Cit. 123
[6] Interview with the author. August 2021.
[7] De la Mora began using human hair in figurative drawings made in 2005. The works created a narrative with children. See: Sergio Rodríguez Blanco, Alegorías Capilares. Trilce Ediciones Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, Instituto de Bellas Artes, Monterrey, México. 2011.

[8] Caillois, Roger, and John Shepley. “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia.” October 31 (1984): 17–32. https://doi.org/10.2307/778354.

I draw these letters
as the day draws its images
and blows over them and does not return
Writing, Octavio Paz

The poet is a creator who disappears behind his work, says Octavio Paz.  This condition is necessary for the reader to complete the poem, since the images can only be freely interpreted when they have been separated from their author. Paz ponders with Heraclitus that it is the logos itself that is manifested in the poem and, through its matter, the individual subjectivity of the author is not expressed, but the voice of all humanity. Similarly, in the works that comprise the series The Sense of Possibility, by Gabriel de la Mora, the artist gives place to nature, which literally acts on the canvases.

These pieces were conceived as a response to the environmental deterioration caused by our industrial and extractive activities. During a visit to Monterrey in September 2015, De la Mora documented the gradual deterioration of Cerro de las Mitras, where there are deposits of raw materials for the manufacture of cement. The series consist of landscapes and seascapes acquired in antique and flea markets – decorative pieces, by forgotten or unknown authors, perhaps as a result of quasi-industrial production lines – that were exposed to the elements for different periods of time.

The process reverses the meaning of outdoor painting: that idyllic figure of the painter in the field that popular culture tends to regard as the ultimate attempt to capture the essence of the landscape. Here nature is imposed on the pieces: the wind, the sun, the humidity, hailstones and changes in temperature act on the pieces to transform them. They have ceased to be a representation of the landscape to become an indication of the presence of nature and its effects. In them the tension is manifested between the practice of painting with its claim to eternity –the image that fixes the moment to stop time, the technique that has developed the materials that try to prevent the decay of the pictorial object– and the deterioration caused over time, a slow, almost imperceptible erosion that has been halted and stabilized again.

The pictorial image is an instant charged with subjectivity that De la Mora turns into a device at service of memory, understood according to the philosopher Manuel Cruz¹, as a human glance about the world, as an instrument to see reality from another perspective. However, the procedure that the artist has used causes a double negative, each of these pieces is the representation of a landscape that is no longer there, and at the same time, it is a representation that disappears: it is the erased memory of an absence indicating that the memory is always on the verge of oblivion.

@museofranciscogoitia 

https://es-la.facebook.com/museogoitia

Inicio

https://www.sicardi.com/exhibitions

Curator:Abraham Villavicencio.
http://www.munal.mx/en/exposicion/originalmentefalso
http://www.munal.mx

Timothy Taylor is delighted to present Neornithes, a new body of work by Gabriel de la Mora. Referring to the taxonomic description for modern birds, Neornithes represents the culmination of de la Mora’s investigations into the role of biological material as both medium and metaphor.

https://www.timothytaylor.com/exhibitions/gabriel-de-la-mora-neornithes/

https://timothytaylor.com/

Perrotin presents Gabriel de la Mora’s first exhibition at our Paris location. De la Mora is a conceptual artist based in Mexico, whose work explores alternative modes of image-making. He works in a diverse range of materials including eggshells, sound screens, human hair, and found objects. The artist’s serial work constitutes a structure of mirror images, echoes, and repetitions.

https://www.perrotin.com/exhibitions/gabriel_de_la_mora_-echo/7867
https://www.perrotin.com/

The exhibition by Gabriel de la Mora (Mexico City, 1968) and Sofie Muller (Ghent, 1974) explores the passage of time and its impact on nature and human beings. The exhibition is configured as a dialogue between Muller’s sculptures and Gabriel De la Mora’s paintings, where the concepts of deconstruction and decadence coexist. Gabriel de la Mora presents a series of found landscapes that were made with oil or acrylic between 1950 and 1990 in Mexico. De la Mora exposes these paintings to the elements for a certain period so that the sun, changes in temperature, acid rain, and other climatic phenomena transform or disappear —partially or completely— the original landscape they represented. With this process in which time and nature take on an important role, de la Mora makes an analogy to the damage caused by a man on the landscape; for this purpose, he mentions: “just as man destroys nature, nature will destroy the representation of nature made by man and will return it to nature”. The title of each piece indicates the days when these paintings were exhibited, which mainly represented mountains or views in which lakes, rivers, and oceans appeared, spaces that suffer the effects of climate change and pollution caused mostly by humans. Sofie Muller, for her part, presents pieces made with alabaster – wounded, cracked and scarred heads – that reflect the deterioration of the human body over time as a consequence of a life defined by struggle, manipulation, personal experience, and the wounds. These pieces that are fragile, poetic, and brutal at the same time are placed on the floor, gently laid on a worn pillow, or suspended on the walls. The sculptures appeal to the study carried out by the artist on the manipulation of the human body and the concept of “manageable human”; Furthermore, Muller exhibits a series of drawings made with blood on alabaster that appeal to the fragility of the human body through the use of natural and organic materials. The overall result is determined by the age of the material used.

http://proyectosmonclova.com/exposicion/pentimento/
http://proyectosmonclova.com/

Starting April 25, you have a new appointment with Mexican contemporary art at Casa de México. We inaugurated the exhibition Inevidencias, by Gabriel de la Mora.
This exhibition brings together works from three different series by the Mexican artist Gabriel de la Mora. Being a consequence of each other, these series allow observing the development of the work of an artist who has sought to explore painting, drawing, and sculpture from a radical subversion of the bases and procedures of these disciplines.
At the same time, the exhibition allows us to get closer and know the work processes that the artist performs in his study of Mexico City, characterized by a meticulous and obsessive exploration of the infinite possibilities that iterations and repetitions allow.

https://www.casademexico.es/detalle-evento/5cac9cb441570e76f00fb467

Perrotin New York is proud to host Gabriel de la Mora’s first exhibition with the gallery. The unique methods and materials de la Mora uses—feathers, eggshells, and human hair, in this case—stem from the artist’s decision to “quit painting” in 2004. The result has been an exploration of alternative modes of image-making, wherein seemingly minimal and often monochrome-looking surfaces belie great technical complexity, conceptual rigor, and embedded information.

https://www.perrotin.com/exhibitions/gabriel_de_la_mora_-tntr-aa/6618
www.perrotin.com

This exhibition is organized by the Pinacoteca of the University of Colima to show the works of Gabriel de la Mora that are part of the Collection of the University of Colima and the Secretary of Culture of the State of Colima.

http://proyectosmonclova.com/

Gabriel de la Mora: Crystals of Inevidence / Cristales de Inevidencia

September 7 – October 19, 2017

Sicardi Gallery

www.sicardigallery.com