CURA.

For his third solo show at Perrotin, Mexican artist Gabriel de la Mora intercepts matters of  fractions of a second — a butterfly’s flapping of wings, the crystallisation of lava into obsidian — and configures them in fragmented forms, posing timeless questions of life, and death.

His recent series entirely composed of butterfly wings, is presented together with a new body of works made of obsidian’s shards. The regular sequence of the square-sized painting-without-paint is rather animated with both colour and movement. Each work is a parade of fragments, meticulously combined into organised geometrical compositions following the chromatic palette of the organic and inorganic specimens employed. The electric blues, citrines, ruby and emerald iridescences of the butterfly wings are alternated to the reflective shades of blacks and greys of the obsidian, resulting in pristine mosaics and chessboards between figuration and abstraction. Their making needs extreme care and a prolonged time — from the ethical sourcing of the materials to their surgical cutting and their cataloguing — leading to the final configurations. The titles unveil an analogous precision, as their archivist style indicates both the number of fragments (up to 2.876) and the species used.

Gabriel de La Mora’s practice of collecting, fragmenting and organising organic and inorganic materials is well-known. Egg shells, feathers, shoes soles and speaker covers, are just a couple of examples. If in the past the focus has been on mundane materials, the new works acquire existential notes. More precisely the show is titled “Élan Vital” which, as Eric Nava Munoz recalls in the exhibition text, is the idea of the existence of a vital force that separates living beings from ordinary matter. That energy which distinguishes living bodies, as Henri Bergson would put it. Gabriel de la Mora proposes instead an approach that builds upon the vitalist tradition and escapes such clear distinctions, rather interpreting life as undecidable. An open question yet again, as technological and scientific advancements are profoundly altering the understanding of such notion. That intrinsic repetition denoting the works could then be interpreted as an attempt to dissect entropy, while embracing the beauty of its ineffability. Despite their scientific character, in fact, Gabriel de La Mora’s paintings convey a sense of wonder. Repetition is looked at as extraordinary, almost magical – an operation acting on the mundane to generate the unforeseen, in hallucinatory compositions. One wonders what Aldous Huxley would make of this show, and a zoologist, a mathematician, a schizophrenic, a kid, a cat… Following the words of Gilles Deleuze: if repetition is possible, it is due to miracle rather than to law.