Consider how long you have been doing the same thing! showcases Gabriel Rico's distinct artistic practice. The exhibition title, imbued with a mildly sarcastic undertone, prompts the viewer to see the world through Rico's eyes. Integrating traditional Mexican techniques with contemporary artistic practices, Rico encourages audience to consider the formation of the modern world and the contemporary human.

Rico's body of work encompasses a diverse array of textures and materials, each comprising the artist's conception of the contemporary cosmos. These elements playfully interact with the light that permeates through the gallery. Through specific cues in each piece, the artist proposes a twisted path through the exhibition. This path reveals numerous possibilities for exploration, allowing each visitor to craft their own narrative.

The Chinese artist and curator Qiu Zhijie wrote the text below on the occasion of Gabriel Rico's museum presentation at Sea World Culture and Arts Center, Shenzhen, in 2022.

Gabriel Rico drew attention from the international art world, first and foremost, with his highly diverse and varied works of object theater. These objects span a broad spectrum, from plastic flowers to coca cola, ceramic plates, CDs, second-hand mobile phones, glass bottles, plastic fruits, toys, and other consumerist goods found in pop culture, to artisanal clay pots, scythe, bricks, baseball bats, and neon signs, rulers, steel rebar folded into an industrial society, and natural objects such as bones, rocks, seashells, twigs and taxidermy, animal horns or fur; and, what can't go without mentioning, the vast array of pictorial and written symbols, relief of leaves, sculptures of dice, and lines, figures, arrows, and equal signs, affixed or painted directly to the wall. These nearly consist of the fragments of this civilisation that future archaeologists will unearth from our Anthropocenic strata.

These objects are, at times, arranged with neo-Dada or surrealist sculpture sensibility; other times, spread out on a tabletop or the ground, reminiscent, says the artist, of a flea market. Sometimes, what's on the floor unfolds on the wall. Linking these objects by arrows, connecting lines, and other signage, they become maps, suggesting an enigmatic network we do not yet fully understand.

Interestingly, these objects tend to be detached – each object is placed at a distance from the others on the wall. Each installation stands away from the others in the gallery, leaving large areas of unoccupied space, which makes the presentation look like an archaeological pit or drawings in an archaeological report outlining the location of an object. In archaeological excavations, we would only uncover fragments of what was originally part of a large whole and more secrets in the concealed and empty spaces, and it's with the bits and pieces we would put together the picture of civilisation.

These objects belong to a particular system, although our capitalist system of things based on notions of origin, function, materiality, and price today cannot categorise them–when placed in the supermarket or storage, they must be stored according to these principles. With the artist's filtering and deliberation in the studio/mind, they reorganise to form another semiotic system. Gabriel Rico once described how meaning is extracted from such a system. He brought things he found on the street to his studio and kept them there for a week or two or even a month. During this period, he fiddled with them on the table, hung something up on the wall, brought one close to the other, and sometimes, when one object paired with another, they would naturally generate a context. This practice allowed the artist to recognise the power of the objects. Hence, they no longer belong to the every day, but to embody the semiotics.

Gabriel Rico is a diligent collector. He gathers things from walks in the woods, flea markets, and garbage dumps and calls items from the general public. The walls of his studio are lined with shelves, packed densely with what he had collected, which are as complex as our world. Some of these items resonate with the artist's memories, and more come from others'–invariably of an individual.

In the twentieth century, large-scale industrial production effaced the spirit of handicraft–the Dadaists and the Surrealists began to collage everyday objects, confronting us with the unauthorised freedom and pleasure brought by the 'an encounter of an umbrella and a surgical scalpel on the sewing machine.' Heidegger once used a pair of peasants' shoes painted by Van Gogh to celebrate the spirit in making things, 'Seen through the gaping black hole of the worn-out shoe interior, one perceives the hardship of the labourer's steps. In these rough, heavy, worn-out shoes, one sees the resolute and arduous steps moving in the cold wind on a vast and monotonous field...In these shoes, the silent call of the earth echoes, presenting the earth's quiet gift of harvest, manifesting the earth's hibernation in the barren fields of hazy and idle winter.' The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke once bemoaned such a loss of spirit, 'Hollow and insignificant things come pouring in from America, fake objects, bootlegged life. An American house, an American apple, or a bunch of American grapes have nothing in common with the houses, the fruits, the grapes that once dissolved into the hopes and contemplations of our ancestors.'

With the advent of the age of consumption, German romanticists such as Heidegger and Rilke felt helpless about 'American things' swept over everything, followed by commodity fetishism becoming the dominant ideology. A new generation of Pop artists eulogised the aesthetics of such mundane things and erected monuments for these vulgar and ephemeral commodities. Although Arte Povera artists in Europe tried to command each object's irreplaceable texture, weight, and fragrance, even devoted brute forces to connecting products of the industrial age, such as steel, coal, glass, and neon, to the earth. Their German ally, Joseph Beuys, an idol of mine and Gabriel Rico's, inherited Rilke and Heidegger's romantic tradition, whose gaze was projected onto the evolutionary significance of our relationship to objects today.

This tradition confronts Gabriel Rico, collector and maker of objects. After Dadaism, Surrealism, Pop Art, and Arte Povera, how objects would embody an appeal in a world of disenchantment becomes the unavoidable question.

I believe Gabriel Rico found his own approach when he named himself 'an ontologist with a heuristic methodology.'

Rico places objects on the wall into formulas or equations. His parentheses are sometimes two curved branches, the equals sign might be two bones or charcoal drawings, and the arrows are neon signs. The structure of geometric shapes and equations becomes the logic of organising objects or forms in the Platonic sense. For Plato, form is the embodiment of an idea. The most authentic representation of the idea of a circle is its geometric form, while matters such as a round plate, a CD record, a compass, or a tree stump are its imperfect projections in the mundane world. In Gabriel Rico's formula, form exists vaguely if they occasionally appear. However, the symbols in the formula are constantly replaced by the matter found in the physical (mundane) world. We are inclined to believe that there is an internal unity in this chaotic world, and we promise to discover and seek such a unity. Yet, we are followers of matter, although the logic of placing objects in a capitalist supermarket is not a meaningful principle of categorisation; barcodes and QR codes can only mark up prices rather than letting the things cry or laugh. There are more facets to a donkey than icosahedrons–'ontologists' believe in pure ideas and reason; they are platonists. The 'heuristic method' exemplifies a fascination with the donkey and branches. Gabriel Rico presents a systematic subversion of Platonism, which makes him neo-platonist.

Press release courtesy Perrotin.