GABRIEL DE LA MORA

Gabriel de la Mora returns to one of the materials with which he initiated his investigation into painting without paint in 2012: eggshell, present in his_CaCO₃_ series—named after the chemical formula for calcium carbonate, the shell’s main component. At that time, the artist sought a minimal expression of painting: a white monochrome surface that could only be achieved, paradoxically, through an exhaustive process of fragmenting, selecting, and arranging thousands of eggshell fragments across a plane.

The works gathered in _Repeated Original _exemplify a practice grounded in repetitive processes, understood as a form of active meditation. Repetition here is continuity and, at the same time, transformation: it does not operate as a style, but as an evolutionary mechanism, as if each series were a species undergoing change. The original series gradually moved beyond monochrome to incorporate geometric patterns that intersperse eggshell fragmentsof varying sizes and tonalities, as seen in 2,155 (666 concave and 1489 convex eggshell fragments). In 2019, the artist began a new series, Between What I Reflect and What I See, replacing eggshells with spherical aluminium-coated glass.

This material shift also entails an optical turn. While eggshell disperses light in a diffuse and disordered manner, aluminized glass reflects it specularly, producing recognizable, albeit unstable, images. By working with concave and convex surfaces, De la Mora introduces distortions that generate an illusion of depth and a fragmentation of the visual field. Reflections move in opposing directions, a phenomenon the artist refers to as visual dyslexia, in which the image appears decentered, inverted, or fractured. These series evolve toward a hybrid configuration that brings eggshell and glass together, as in 11,973 (8,570 eggshell fragments,1,939 concave and 1,464 convex glass fragments), where both modes of light reflection coexist.

Due to their scale, some of these work create an immersive experience—such as 10,132 (5,113 convex and 5,019 concave eggshell fragments) or _27,798 _(9,307 concave and 18,491 convex glass fragments). The glass pieces generate a kind of self-portrait in which the viewer takes the place of the artist. The resulting image is far removed from a selfie, that omnipresent genre of our time: it is a multiplicity of fragments that alternating sections of glass invert and separate, creating planes that produce a sense of estrangement, akin to the moment of first encountering one’s reflection in a mirror.

The curvature of the fragments in CaCO₃ and Between What I Reflect and What I See produces a tangible volume upon the pictorial plane, from which the artist moves toward three-dimensionality. The plane closes in on itself, as if under the pressure of an irrational gesture, as seen in 1,514 (522 glass fragments and 922 eggshell fragments). As the form of the works change, so too does their visual regime: these pieces inhabit an intermediate territory between surface and object, where painting and sculpture coexist. The image fragments, multiplies, or dissolves depending on the angle from which it is observed.

Situated between monochrome and geometric abstraction, between image and object, these series invite us to consider the image from a perspective that moves beyond traditional debates around color, abstraction, or representation. Instead, they propose a reflection on the very nature of images and, ultimately, on how we perceive them. From this perspective, the image is not the object itself, but the state of light after it has interacted with its surface. De la Mora makes evident that images belong neither to the object nor to the viewer; they are a transient state of light, a precarious and mutable phenomenon that emerges—and dissolves—at the encounter between matter and gaze.

—Eric Nava Muñoz

Courtesy Perrotin.