GABRIEL RICO

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 thegallery. Through specific cues in each piece, the artist proposes a twistedpath through the exhibition. This path reveals numerous possibilities forexploration, allowing each visitor to craft their own narrative.

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

Gabriel Rico drew attention from the international art world, first andforemost, with his highly diverse and varied works of object theater. Theseobjects span a broad spectrum, from plastic flowers to coca cola, ceramicplates, 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 intoan industrial society, and natural objects such as bones, rocks, seashells,twigs and taxidermy, animal horns or fur; and, what can’t go withoutmentioning, the vast array of pictorial and written symbols, relief of leaves,sculptures of dice, and lines, figures, arrows, and equal signs, affixed orpainted directly to the wall. These nearly consist of the fragments of thiscivilisation that future archaeologists will unearth from our Anthropocenicstrata.

These objects are, at times, arranged with neo-Dada or surrealist sculpturesensibility; other times, spread out on a tabletop or the ground, reminiscent,says the artist, of a flea market. Sometimes, what’s on the floor unfoldson the wall. Linking these objects by arrows, connecting lines, and othersignage, they become maps, suggesting an enigmatic network we do notyet fully understand.

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

These objects belong to a particular system, although our capitalist systemof things based on notions of origin, function, materiality, and price todaycannot categorise them–when placed in the supermarket or storage, theymust be stored according to these principles. With the artist’s filtering anddeliberation in the studio/mind, they reorganise to form another semioticsystem. Gabriel Rico once described how meaning is extracted from sucha system. He brought things he found on the street to his studio and keptthem 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 tothe other, and sometimes, when one object paired with another, they wouldnaturally generate a context. This practice allowed the artist to recognise thepower of the objects. Hence, they no longer belong to the every day, but toembody the semiotics.

Gabriel Rico is a diligent collector. He gathers things from walks in thewoods, flea markets, and garbage dumps and calls items from the generalpublic. The walls of his studio are lined with shelves, packed densely withwhat he had collected, which are as complex as our world. Some of theseitems 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 spiritof handicraft–the Dadaists and the Surrealists began to collage everydayobjects, confronting us with the unauthorised freedom and pleasure broughtby the ‘an encounter of an umbrella and a surgical scalpel on the sewingmachine.’ Heidegger once used a pair of peasants’ shoes painted by VanGogh to celebrate the spirit in making things, ‘Seen through the gapingblack hole of the worn-out shoe interior, one perceives the hardship of thelabourer’s steps. In these rough, heavy, worn-out shoes, one sees the resoluteand arduous steps moving in the cold wind on a vast and monotonousfield...In these shoes, the silent call of the earth echoes, presenting theearth’s quiet gift of harvest, manifesting the earth’s hibernation in the barrenfields of hazy and idle winter.’ The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke oncebemoaned such a loss of spirit, ‘Hollow and insignificant things comepouring in from America, fake objects, bootlegged life. An American house,an American apple, or a bunch of American grapes have nothing in commonwith the houses, the fruits, the grapes that once dissolved into the hopesand contemplations of our ancestors.’

With the advent of the age of consumption, German romanticists suchas Heidegger and Rilke felt helpless about ‘American things’ swept overeverything, followed by commodity fetishism becoming the dominantideology. A new generation of Pop artists eulogised the aesthetics of suchmundane things and erected monuments for these vulgar and ephemeralcommodities. Although Arte Povera artists in Europe tried to commandeach 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, anidol of mine and Gabriel Rico’s, inherited Rilke and Heidegger’s romantictradition, whose gaze was projected onto the evolutionary significance ofour relationship to objects today.

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

I believe Gabriel Rico found his own approach when he named himself ‘anontologist with a heuristic methodology.’

Rico places objects on the wall into formulas or equations. His parenthesesare sometimes two curved branches, the equals sign might be two bonesor charcoal drawings, and the arrows are neon signs. The structure ofgeometric shapes and equations becomes the logic of organising objectsor 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 geometricform, while matters such as a round plate, a CD record, a compass, or atree stump are its imperfect projections in the mundane world. In GabrielRico’s formula, form exists vaguely if they occasionally appear. However, thesymbols in the formula are constantly replaced by the matter found in thephysical (mundane) world. We are inclined to believe that there is an internalunity in this chaotic world, and we promise to discover and seek such aunity. Yet, we are followers of matter, although the logic of placing objectsin a capitalist supermarket is not a meaningful principle of categorisation;barcodes and QR codes can only mark up prices rather than letting thethings 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 makeshim neo-platonist.