Gabriel de la Mora

November 9 - December 22, 2012

Opening Reception with the Artist

Friday, November 9, 6-8

Sicardi Gallery is pleased to announce T.O.E.F.M.U.T.I.T.O.A.I.I.*, our second exhibition of work by Mexican artist Gabriel de la Mora. The show opens on Friday, November 9th, with cocktail reception from 6 to 8 p.m. The artist will be in attendance.

Trained as an architect and a painter, Gabriel de la Mora is known for conceptual works that straddle a wide spectrum of media and techniques. In this exhibition, central themes and traits that characterize his oeuvre are emphasized, including a fascination for the phenomenological attributes of painting, an attraction to very specific and often found materials, and an exhaustive attention to detail. His work questions—and experiments with—the interstitial limits between painting, drawing and sculpture, as well as the tension between formal procedures and conceptual methodologies. In his hands, the material residue of a symbolic experience becomes a record prone to abstraction.

The title work in the exhibition, T.O.E.F.M.U.T.I.T.O.A.I.I.*, takes it’s name from a quote from Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, “The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.*” It is a blank, unpainted canvas strategically burned by the artist. Much like other pieces in this exhibition including conceptual reconstructions of crumbling plafonds, re-appropriated propaganda posters and photographic interventions, the work remains suspended in a state just previous to its own disappearance. The artist alchemically re-inscribes these residues, submitting the past to the hermeneutic scrutiny of the present. This is a formal and conceptual quality that defines much of de la Mora’s work: an aesthetic of ruin that exists on the verge of evaporation.