Gabriel de la Mora - Écho | Perrotin
An arresting example of craft and obsession is provided by this Mexican-born artist, on show at Perrotin. De la Mora loves wall-mounted works, created piecemeal with great meticulousness. Their overall effect is weirdly heartening and uplifting.
From a distance, the small, monochrome works, generally layered and repeated across the wall, do not look like much. It’s only when you get closer, when you realise what they’re made from, that the involuntary intake of breath comes. So an orangey-pinky flat background becomes an orangey-pink mass striated with tiny cracks, and then becomes a gigantic, mind-bending jigsaw of uniformly-sized shards of eggshell.
576 - I / Pi, 2016 - (shoe) leather and wood
My favourites in this exhibition were made of shoe soles, rubber and leather, all different kinds - gridded, stuck together and mounted on the wall. Elsewhere, speaker screens, feathers and scraps of textile also feature.
De la Mora works from found, discarded, and obsolete objects - nothing fancy. The artist, born in Mexico and showing in France, was new to me. I hope he crosses the channel to London too.
And that also goes for Golnaz Payani, on show at Praz-Delavallade, whose repeated tiny variations in fabric and wood were also deeply impressive - and reminded me of de la Mora. It shouldn’t matter whether either artist uses assistants to create their effects; what matters is that their work is redolent of hours of careful craft - and is all the more beautiful for it.
Gabriel de la Mora: Écho is at Perrotin (Paris). October 12 - December 21 2019