Review: Gabriel De La Mora’s “Repeated Original” at Perrotin
How many pictures can be contained within a single image? Or to put it another way, how many different realities can exist on a seemingly plain monochrome surface composed of thousands of micropatterns that interact with light and space in different ways? For almost a decade, Mexican artist Gabriel de la Mora has been searching for a way to paint without paint, using instead both organic and inorganic fragments from the universe to test new symbioses and synergies of beauty, where the human-made world can still encounter some illusion of harmony and cosmic order within the broader entropic course of nature.
Embracing and blending the legacies of Minimalism and Arte Povera, De la Mora has formulated his own unique form of organic and cosmic abstraction where micro and macro cosmos collide. Obsessively collecting remnants of both the constructed and natural world—eggshells, shoe soles, speaker screens, feathers, butterflies and stones—he engaged with a material archaeology that attempts new forms of taxonomy and classification. The resulting compositions are visually and alchemically harmonious and deeply attuned to the innate properties of materials and the surrounding environment.
In these material afterlives, the original element almost disappears, exposing the continuous cycles of accumulation and erosion that govern all things, as entities turn into particles and fragments only to take shape again in new forms within the endless circle of entropy and transformation. “Everything begins with the fragility of the material and the tension that comes from that fragility. The material may be fragmented, but through form it finds new resistance and new strength,” De la Mora tells Observer as we walk through his latest show at Perrotin. The exhibition’s title, “Repeated Original,” alludes to this, revealing an artist whose practice exists in relation to and collaboration with the broader cycles of matter.
“The idea is to go as minimal as possible in painting but through the maximum amount of time, work and effort. It moves from the minimal to the maximum, and then back to the minimal,” he explains. The series he is presenting here is a culmination of this relentless pursuit across different materials. In his CaCO₃ series—named after the chemical formula for calcium carbonate—white eggshell becomes the main component, used through fragmentation and repetition to create a new monochrome whole.
“There is always a dialogue here with abstraction,” De la Mora says. “For me, everything is both formal and conceptual. Everything becomes a monochrome, an abstraction, and a repetition of images with differences.” He often uses the analogy of digital pixels. An image composed of a single pixel, 20 pixels arranged in a grid or 20,000 pixels forming a realistic image can still represent the same subject. Similarly, his work shifts between micro and macro structures, exploring correspondences within the broader architecture of reality.
In this repetitive cycle of fragmenting, destroying and reassembling, the work begins to resemble a form of meditation—one that recalls the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi with its acceptance of impermanence and transformation. De la Mora describes his practice as an active form of meditation, an ongoing engagement with matter that requires attuning to its physical properties in order to guide these fragments toward their next form. “I’m always playing with the micro and the macro—the correspondences, the structure of reality and all these kinds of things,” he says. “It requires a lot of discipline. But it also becomes something meditative. I became a bit obsessive with the series, but when you see how the light interacts with them, it becomes incredible.”
This inventive engagement with raw materials echoes the artisanal resourcefulness shared across many Latin American cultures, where strong ties to ancestral traditions have preserved a rare intelligence of materials. In many Latin American contexts, he acknowledges, artists have worked with humble or leftover materials, developing an ethos of artisanal transformation. For him, transformation is the central concept: objects originally created for practical functions acquire new meanings once their original function ends. “My definition of art is simple: art is not created or destroyed—it is transformed,” he asserts. “If I had to reduce my work to one word, it would be transformation. You could also call it a chemical or alchemical transformation, a change of state.”
From this reflection came the exhibition’s title. “The original is unique, but there are never two identical things. True repetition does not exist, because there are always differences. There are no two identical DNAs, no identical voices, eyes or fingerprints. You will never find two people who are exactly the same,” he explains, noting how one can still rediscover beauty in harmony through the act of composing fragments. His installations are refined, event luminous, yet they remain deeply material, built from physical substances and manual labor.
The current body of work emerges from his previously continuous attempt at “painting without paint,” consistent throughout his practice: the idea of expanding painting beyond traditional pigment to engage with the very fabric of reality as image, and with the endless possible images already present within the continuous movements of particles coagulating into form. The works on view simultaneously function as drawings, paintings and sculptures, combining linear structure, surface and three-dimensional presence while maintaining a formal language of monochrome abstraction and subtle variation.
“Again, everything here is formal and conceptual. Everything becomes a monochrome, an abstraction and a repetition of images with differences,” De la Mora emphasizes. Yet what he wants viewers to experience is the process, the material and the form. “The first impact of any artwork is always visual—it enters through the eyes, through the formal aspect and through emotion,” he says. “Then contemplation begins to raise questions. Something moves you emotionally, and then it makes you think. For me, that is the best thing that can happen in art.” Everything is formal and conceptual at the same time. “These two things cannot be separated. If one of them is missing, everything is missing,” he says, smiling.
Yet De la Mora also says that even the conceptual dimension ultimately belongs to the viewer. He wants to leave the final decoding and meaning-making to those who encounter the work. “Art is for everyone. You don’t need to know about art to see art. If you have eyes, you will see it, and you will think. And if you don’t have eyes, you can experience art through touch or through other senses,” he explains. “Art has to speak to the viewer in many directions.”
He doubled down on this belief during his recent exhibition at the Jumex Museum in Mexico, which closed after Mexico City Art Week in February. Over six months, he conducted 79 guided tours and discovered that people touring the show often identified meanings in his work that he himself had never recognized.
His deliberate choice to leave the work’s coded material composition open-ended also informs his decision to title works only with numbers describing their material elements rather than imposing interpretation—a method that can appear almost scientific, bringing the work closer to the idea of taxonomy. “You might call that a scientific approach, but for me it is closer to philosophy—asking questions in many directions. Science and art are connected in many ways, though not necessarily in the technical sense in my work.”
His practice combines both a scientific engagement with materials—in terms of their chemistry and physics—and a more creative engagement with the philosophical and the spiritual. “I love how an idea can create a work, the work can create a series and the series can create a new medium,” he notes, emphasizing the experimental dimension of his practice. At this moment alone, in his studio, he is exploring several different materials he has never worked with before, trying to find the equation that can turn their apparent entropy into a human-understandable order. In this process, time becomes extremely important. “It is part of the idea of doing almost nothing—with the maximum amount of work—to create a monochrome, which is the most minimal image possible. I really love that contradiction.”
From this time-consuming yet extremely playful exploration of the properties of materials came his introduction of spherical aluminum-coated glass, marking a new optical turn. Each work’s alternating concave and convex surfaces produce recognizable yet unstable and potentially endlessly multiplying images depending on the perspective. De la Mora engages with—and simultaneously reveals—an alternative mathematical formula that opens access to different ways of perceiving reality. “If you look at this piece from here, it creates a kind of visual illusion—some elements seem closer, others seem farther away,” he observes, pointing out how specific optical effects emerge from the interaction between concave and convex reflections. “The concave surface creates the illusion that something is closer, and your reflection appears upside down. The convex surface creates the illusion that it is moving farther away and appears smaller,” he acknowledges. “Then, the introduction and combination of eggshell fragments in other separates everything, so you have the sensation of three planes even though there is actually only one.”
The eggshell fragments act as separators between these reflections, producing the sensation of multiple visual planes even though the surface is physically flat. As viewers move through the space, the reflections shift and seem to animate the surface, giving the impression that the work itself is moving. In reality, the composition remains completely static—the movement belongs to the viewer. Through this interaction, the eye begins to register what feels like three distinct spatial levels emerging from a single plane.
Just as dyslexia can cause written characters to appear reversed, the works invert the viewer’s expectations: what seems to move upward may actually move downward, and vice versa. “When you look at my hand, what appears to be going up is actually going down, and what seems to go down is going up,” De la Mora points out. “I am dyslexic. I write backwards, like a mirror image. So this is almost like a visual form of dyslexia. Instead of numbers and letters, it happens with images. My connection with this work comes partly from my own dyslexia, because when you are dyslexic, you are constantly seeing things in reverse.”
At the same time, the installation engages closely with the architecture of the space. The circular motifs serendipitously echoed the gallery’s columns, while the warm gallery lighting he had just set up contrasted perfectly with the cold surfaces of steel and concrete. Even the exhibition’s timing—opening March 5 and closing April 11—places it between winter and spring, a moment he unexpectedly saw reflected in the interaction between the works and the surrounding environment of snow, rain and shifting light.
As viewers move through the space, small reflective fragments catch the spotlights, producing flickering points of illumination that resemble constellations or open the surface into lively diamonds. “Yesterday, we were discussing how to illuminate the exhibition. This morning, I came back and looked closely at the works, and we decided to try turning off the ceiling lights,” he says. “Look how the light interacts with them. They become luminous bodies.”
Sometimes it seems as though Gabriel De la Mora is simply helping things find their place. Yet within this conscious relationship between the work and its broader spatial interactions, his architecture training also emerges, which, like that of many Mexican artists of his generation, gave him a particular understanding of materials and space. “In a way, these works are like architecture without function or service. They are sculptures, but they also resemble mechanical models,” he acknowledges. One can still see the more geometrical—and architectural—dimension of these works in the drawings they follow, tracing the underlying geometry that structures the entire project: compositions built from straight lines and circles. “I always begin with drawings. I don’t use computers or digital tools,” De la Mora explains, acknowledging how his process might even feel old-fashioned, almost like something from the 1980s. Rather than relying on digital tools, he works deliberately at a drafting table in an analog way, using millimetric paper, parallel rulers, pencils and sheets of mylar. “I place one sheet next to another, constructing the geometry step by step. The structure always begins with lines and circles, and then the images appear through reflections and repetitions within that geometry,” he explains.
These drawings form an extensive archive for each work, and he considers them artworks in their own right. The process itself has become so central to the practice that he imagines it could form the basis of an exhibition devoted entirely to the making of the work. The studio drawings, he notes, reveal another dimension of the practice—one that almost resembles a performance involving direct engagement with the structure of reality, yet from a very different perspective: one that no longer follows the strictly anthropocentric, dominant and extractive approach, but rather applies a more ancient intelligence of materials, more attuned to the complex relationship between human making and broader cosmic orders.
It is a system of exchanges and interrelations that De la Mora not only encourages viewers to acknowledge but also actively engages with himself, subtly repositioning them within a dynamic shift in perspective. He connects the process to curiosity and play, recalling his father—a professor of philosophy—who told him that children are, in fact, the best philosophers because they discover the world by constantly asking why. That sense of continuous questioning and wonder, he says, remains central to his work. Playfully triggering our curiosity through his exploration and manipulation of material presences, his artwork encourages us to look at it—and at the world around us—with the same childlike attitude: free from rigid scientific, ideological or political infrastructures, and with fresh eyes.
More in Artists
