Gabriel de la Mora has focused part of his work on subverting and deconstructing pictorial practice, as well as investigating the history and possibilities of monochrome from a provocative and radical perspective. The seven paintings that make up this work are part of the 'Sense of Possibility' series, a line of work in which the artist explores - with a nod to the famous Unhappy Readymade created by Marcel Duchamp in 1919 - the effects that the atmosphere, the age of time and climate produced in monochrome paintings exposed to the open air for different periods of time.
As is the case from D-1 to D-7, several of the works carried out in this direction take up a first experiment carried out in 2013. In that year, de la Mora was invited to carry out a commission for the Tropicalia Negra exhibition, presented at the Museo Experimental el Eco in Mexico City - a unique venue of its kind because it was conceived from the perspective of “emotional architecture” advocated by its creator, the German artist and architect based in Mexico, Mathias Goeritz. Included in this exhibition was one of Goeritz's Messages, a series of gilded and monochrome works made with gold plate with which the German artist sought a spiritual renewal in the post-war artistic setting. Exploring the limits and interstices that inhabit the distance between the copy and the original, de la Mora made a 1-to-1 replica of Goeritz's work for this exhibition, which was displayed in the interior courtyard of the museum. Over the months, the piece suffered the effects of the weather, distancing themselves from their original reference and generating a series of random and unexpected representations on the surface of the painting.
Following an analogous procedure, the paintings that make up D-1 to D-7 were made expressly for his individual exhibition, 'What We do not See, What Looks at Us', displayed at the Amparo Museum in 2014. On that occasion, the artist placed seven monochrome stretched canvases in an interior courtyard of the museum for the duration of the exhibition. Later, as with all the pieces that make up this series, he worked with a restorer to fix the traces and material adhesions that the age of time had left on them.
With this type of work, Gabriel de la Mora ironically alludes to the practice of “pleinairisme” or “painting in the open air," through a process that does not seek to represent nature, it rather prints its force on the painting itself. At the same time, these are pieces that question the notion of authorship, since the final settlements depend more on the climate than on a creative hand. Finally, the artist subverts with this strategy the apparent autonomy of the pictorial practice, turning it into a project of a specific site that is later rearticulated as an object in which it is possible to observe the traces and signs of the weather and the ing of time.
EKA, August 2020
https://gabrieldelamora.com/
Willy Kautz and Gabriel de la Mora, Gabriel de la Mora: Lo que no vemos lo que nos mira, Puebla, Amparo Museum, 2014, p. 101-105.
Gabriel de la Mora has focused part of his work on subverting and deconstructing pictorial practice, as well as investigating the history and possibilities of monochrome from a provocative and radical perspective. The seven paintings that make up this work are part of the 'Sense of Possibility' series, a line of work in which the artist explores - with a nod to the famous Unhappy Readymade created by Marcel Duchamp in 1919 - the effects that the atmosphere, the age of time and climate produced in monochrome paintings exposed to the open air for different periods of time.
