Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is delighted to announce the opening of The artist is the author who disappears…, a solo exhibition featuring gallery artist Gabriel de la Mora at Pinacoteca Universitaria in Colima, Mexico. The exhibition will be on view from June 2022 through January 2023.
As Eric Nava Muñoz notes, "These pieces were conceived as a response to the environmental deterioration caused by our industrial and extractive activities. During a visit to Monterrey in September 2015, De la Mora documented the gradual deterioration of Cerro de las Mitras, where there are deposits of raw materials for the manufacture of cement. The series consists of landscapes and seascapes acquired in antique and flea markets - decorative pieces, by forgotten or unknown authors, perhaps as a result of quasi-industrial production lines - that were exposed to the elements for different periods of time.
"The process reverses the meaning of outdoor painting: that idyllic figure of the painter in the field that popular culture tends to regard as the ultimate attempt to capture the essence of the landscape. Here nature is imposed on the pieces: the wind, the sun, the humidity, hailstones and changes in temperature act on the pieces to transform them. They have ceased to be a representation of the landscape to become an indication of the presence of nature and its effects. In them the tension is manifested between the practice of painting with its claim to eternity – the image that fixes the moment to stop time, the technique that has developed the materials that try to prevent the decay of the pictorial object – and the deterioration caused over time, a slow, almost imperceptible erosion that has been halted and stabilized again.
"The pictorial image is charged with subjectivity that De la Mora turns into a device at service of memory, understood according to the philosopher Manuel Cruz, as a human glance about the world, as an instrument to see reality from another perspective. However, the procedure that the artist has used causes a double negative; each of these pieces is the representation of a landscape that is no longer there, and at the same time, it is a representation that disappears: it is the erased memory of an absence indicating that the memory is always on the verge of oblivion."
Image: Gabriel de la Mora, 58 días II, 2019. Eroded and consolidated oil on canvas. 7.87 x 9.84 x .78 in. Courtesy of the artist and Proyectos Monclova.