Abstraction in Action Gabriel de la Mora: Sound Inscriptions on Fabric https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/gabriel-de-la-mora-sound-inscriptions-fabric/

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Artist: Gabriel de la Mora 

Gabriel de la Mora: Sound Inscriptions on Fabric
July 15, 2016 – September 2, 2016
The Drawing Center
New York, NY

Gabriel de la Mora is best known for constructing visual works from found, discarded, and obsolete objects, such as eggshells and shoe soles. De la Mora describes these objects, which have outlived their usefulness, as caches for historical information about everyday life. In his exhibition at The Drawing Center, De la Mora will present an installation of fifty-five pairs of found speaker screens. Each screen is imprinted with an inscription created by the dust and air that circulated through the speaker during its life, recording the cadence of countless voices, advertisements, news broadcasts, soap operas, football games, and music, as well as noise, interference, and silence.

July 1, 2016 Monochrome Undone https://abstractioninaction.com/projects/monochrome-undone/

Monochrome Undone
SPACE Collection

Curated by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill
October 24, 2015 – April 1, 2016
SPACE, Irvine, CA

Artists: Ricardo Alcaide, Alejandra Barreda, Andrés Bedoya*, Emilio Chapela, Eduardo Costa, Danilo Dueñas, Magdalena Fernández, Valentina Liernur, Marco Maggi, Manuel Mérida, Gabriel de la Mora, Miguel Angel Ríos, Lester Rodríguez, Eduardo Santiere, Emilia Azcárate, Marta Chilindrón, Bruno Dubner, Rubén Ortíz-Torres, Fidel Sclavo, Renata Tassinari, Georgina Bringas, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Thomas Glassford, José Luis Landet, Jorge de León, Bernardo Ortiz, Martin Pelenur, Teresa Pereda, Pablo Rasgado, Ricardo Rendón, Santiago Reyes Villaveces, Mariela Scafati, Gabriel Sierra, Jaime Tarazona, Adán Vallecillo, Horacio Zabala.

The monochrome as a focus in the SPACE Collection began in a spontaneous form and soon became a systematic field of research. This exhibition is about the contemporary monochrome in Latin America. The monochrome is one of the most elusive and complex art forms of modern and contemporary art. If we think about its origins or meaning, we find that the monochrome is many contradictory things. The monochrome is neither a movement nor a category; it is not an “ism” or a thing. It may be painting as object, the material surface of the work itself, the denial of perspective or narrative, or anything representational. The monochrome may be a readymade, a found object, or an environment—anything in which a single color dominates. The monochrome can be critical and unstable, especially when it dialogues critically or in tension with modernism. This exhibition is organized into four different themes: The Everyday Monochrome, The White Monochrome, The Elusive Monochrome and The Transparent Monochrome. These themes have been conceived to create context and suggest interpretations that otherwise might be illegible.  These may overlap at times, pointing to the multiplicity of content in many of the works. The unclassifiable and variable nature of the monochrome in Latin America today is borne of self-criticality and from unique Latin contexts, to exist within its own specificity and conceptual urgency.

To purchase the catalogue click here.

El monocromo, como enfoque de SPACE Collection, comenzó de forma espontánea y a poco se convirtió en un campo de investigación sistemático. Esta exposición trata sobre el monocromo contemporáneo en América latina. El monocromo es una de las formas de arte más elusivas y complejas del arte moderno y contemporáneo. Si reflexionamos acerca de sus orígenes o su significado, nos encontramos con que puede albergar muchas cosas contradictorias. El monocromo no es un movimiento ni una categoría; no es un “ismo” ni una cosa. Puede ser la pintura como objeto, la superficie material de la obra, la negación de la perspectiva o de todo lo representativo o narrativo. El monocromo puede ser un readymade, un objeto encontrado, un cuadro o un ambiente: cualquier cosa definida como una superficie cromáticamente uniforme donde un solo color predomina. El monocromo puede ser crítico e inestable, especialmente cuando se dialoga críticamente o en tensión con el modernismo. Esta exposición está organizada en cuatro temas: el monocromo cotidiano, el monocromo blanco, el monocromo elusivo y el monocromo transparente. Estos temas han sido concebidos a fin de crear un contexto y sugerir interpretaciones que de otra manera podrían ser ilegibles. Éstos pueden superponerse a veces, apuntando a la multiplicidad de contenidos en muchas de las obras. La naturaleza indeterminada, inclasificable y variable del monocromo en Latinoamérica hoy en día es producto de la autocrítica y de los contextos propios, para existir dentro de su propia especificidad y urgencia conceptual.

Para comprae el libro haz clic aquí.

September 25, 2015 Gabriel de la Mora: Tres pies: el enigma de la sucesión. Envejecimiento y retiro https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/gabriel-de-la-mora-tres-pies-el-enigma-de-la-sucesion-envejecimiento-y-retiro/

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Artists: Alejandra Avilés, Gabriel Boils, Virginia Colwell, Rodolfo Díaz Cervantes, Miguel Fernández de Castro, Helena Fernández Cavada, Renato Garza, Sonia Hedstrand, Gonzalo Lebrija, Gabriel de la Mora, Víctor Lerma y Mónica Mayer, Carla Rippey, Ling Sepúlveda.

Tres pies: el enigma de la sucesión. Envejecimiento y retiro
Curaduría: Víctor Palacios y Felipe Zúñiga
June 20 – September 20, 2015
Casa del Lago
Mexico City, Mexico

Exposición colectiva que aborda desde distintas perspectivas artísticas, la experiencia humana del envejecimiento y el retiro. ¿Qué sucede cuando llegamos a esa edad? ¿En qué ocupan su tiempo las personas jubiladas? ¿Es el retiro una medida económica más que humana? ¿Cómo moldea ésta nuestro presente y nuestra visión del futuro?

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Foto cortesía de Gabriel de la Mora

July 13, 2015 Ricardo Alcaide, Darío Escobar & Gabriel de la Mora: Líneas de la Mano https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/ricardo-alcaide-dario-escobar-gabriel-de-la-mora-lineas-de-la-mano/

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Artists: Esvin Alarcón Lam, Ricardo Alcaide, Darío Escobar, Gianfranco Foschino, Juan Fernando Herrán, Harold Mendez, Gabriel de la Mora, Ronny Quevedo, and Ana Maria Tavares.

Líneas de la Mano
May 12 – July 3, 2015
Sicardi Gallery
Houston, TX, USA

Featuring artists from Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Venezuela, Líneas de la mano (lines of the hand, lifelines) takes as its premise the idea that geometries connect the quotidian moments of our daily lives. Indeed, a line connects two points, A and B, start and finish, end and beginning; lines are defined by this function of connection, even as they continue to move past the points they connect

The artists in the exhibition use the languages and conceptual frameworks of modernism and abstraction to suggest poetic connections: between people, between historical referents, between political experiences, and between places. The line as connector becomes a way of skillfully addressing fraught histories, and of weaving a set of relationships. Líneas de la mano also considers the tactility of each object. The works exhibited demonstrate a strong relationship to materials and their histories, from the scrap metal of Guatemalan buses, to the thick, sooty texture of an archival photograph transferred to aluminum, to the fabric retrieved from vintage radio speakers.

The exhibition title playfully alludes to palmistry; the connection is meant to highlight the actions of the hand, implicit in the creation of the work. Astrologer, numerologist, clairvoyant, and palm-reader Cheiro (William John Warner, 1866-1936) writes, “the hand… denotes the change going on in the brain, even years before the action of the individual becomes the result of such a change.”  Read in a different context, it is a compelling statement about the artistic process.

June 5, 2015 Fernando Carbajal, Eduardo Costa, Juan Raúl Hoyos, Gabriel de la Mora, Sergio Vega: Affective Architectures https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/fernando-carbajal-eduardo-costa-juan-raul-hoyos-gabriel-de-la-mora-sergio-vega-affective-architectures/

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Artists: Milton Becerra, Esteban Blanco, Carola Bravo, Monika Bravo, Tania Candiani, Fernando Carabajal, Consuelo Castañeda, Othon Castañeda, Eduardo Costa, Juan Raúl Hoyos, Pablo León de la Barra, Gonzalo Lebrija, Alberto Lezaca, Gabriel de la Mora, Atelier Morales, Ronald Morán, Bernardo Olmos, Ernesto Oroza, Gamaliel Rodríguez, Rafiño, Leyden Rodríguez-Casanova, Mariasun Salgado, Sergio Vega, and Viviana Zargón.

Affective Architectures
Curated by Aluna Curatorial Collective
Closing reception March 28th, 2015
Show ran from December 6, 2014 – February 15, 2015
Aluna Art Foundation
Miami, FL, USA

Amidst the flood of banal images, what artworks created through an inter-subjective dialogue with the architecture or the spaces inhabited by artists, have the power to move us and remain in our memory? This question was the point of departure in Affective Architectures, an exhibition curated by Aluna Curatorial Collective (Adriana Herrera and Willy Castellanos), and presented with the collaboration of the Instituto Cultural de México in Miami. The opening will be on December 6 at the headquarters of Aluna Art Foundation and the show will run until February 15, 2015.

Twenty three artists from Mexico, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Spain display specular visions of the architectures that are, or were, mirrors of the failed dreams of modernism in the continent, but they also reveal the potential reserves of creativeness that often manifest themselves in the midst of chaos or necessity.

Walter Benjamin, who left the legacy of a perspective of the world around him that was as critical as it was poetic, used to say that architecture was the oldest of arts because the human need for shelter is timeless. And yet, immersed in the architectures that model our cities, we perceive them absentmindedly, without discovering to what extent they contain and alter the acts of our existence.

For Benjamin, criticism was a matter of “the right distance”. The works exhibited reflect an affective gaze on the cities inhabited on the border between the public and the private: they are re­counts of the steps that have been walked, testimonies of having got lost, but also of groping for a way out. Many images, going against the wish to “do” or build characteristic of modernism, reveal the wish to “undo” or “deconstruct”, and track the past and the present of large cities, posing questions about what may be possible.

Paraphrasing what Gerhard Ritcher termed “the question of position”, each of the participating artists approaches inhabited architectures based on a constant negotiation between closeness and distance. They observe, without indifference —from the closeness of affectivity, but also from the distant perspective of memory—, architectures that contain ‘life deposits’, stored memories of life experiences in spaces, which often fuse with social histories everywhere in the world.

Affective Architectures functions as a mirror reflecting our biographies within the failure of the grand narratives in Latin American and Caribbean cities, but also as a window into alternative passages: strategies of the imagination that may allow us to reinvent our ways of inhabiting the world.

About the Instituto Cultural de México en Miami (Mexican Cultural Institute in Miami): The Instituto Cultural de México in Miami (ICMM) projects the wealth and diversity of the millenary culture of that country in Southern Florida. In addition to fostering the acquisition of knowledge on Mexico’s history, literature, cinematography and dramatic arts, it assigns special relevance to the new artistic trends and generations that are successfully developing in Mexico and that, due to their acknowledged quality, have achieved a solid projection at the national and international level.

March 30, 2015 Gabriel de la Mora: (f) https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/gabriel-de-la-mora-f/

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Artist: Gabriel de la Mora

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February 3, 2015
OMR Galeria
Mexico City, Mexico

Solo show by Mexican artist Gabriel de la Mora

January 30, 2015 Gabriel de la Mora: Lucíferos https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/gabriel-de-la-mora-luciferos/

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Artist: Gabriel de la Mora

Lucíferos
October 30 – December 21, 2014
Sicardi Gallery
Houston, TX, USA

In Gabriel de la Mora’s most recent body of work, he uses fire-making as a vehicle for reconsidering geometric abstraction. Striking thousands of matches against the red phosphorus-covered paper on the sides of matchboxes, de la Mora collects the used strikers and arranges them in compositions that create repeating patterns, rectangular grids, and minimalist constructions. The resulting imagery evokes two distinct historical moments. On the one hand, the enigmatic geometries are suggestive of Minimalist paintings from the 1950s and 1960s. And, on the other, the used object, marked by the act of striking matches, insistently presents another story: that of the industrialization of fire through the invention of matches (originally called Lucifers). By pairing these two narratives, de la Mora presents a new series of questions about abstraction and vision, invention and industrialization.

Gabriel de la Mora (b. 1968, Mexico) studied architecture before completing his M.F.A. at Pratt Institute, New York.  His solo exhibition Lo que no vemos lo que nos mira, curated by Willy Kautz, is currently on view at Museo Amparo in Puebla, Mexico.  He has had solo exhibitions at NC-Arte, Bogotá, Colombia; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Mexico; Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA), Long Beach, California, USA; and the Art Museum of the Americas, Washington, D.C., among other museums. This is his third solo exhibition at Sicardi Gallery.

Gabriel de la Mora’s work is included in important public and private collections, including Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, CA, USA; Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA), Long Beach, CA, USA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), Houston, TX, USA; El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY, USA; Colección Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, Miami, FL, USA; Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico; Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico; Art Museum of the Americas, Washington, D.C., USA; among many others.

November 20, 2014 Gabriel de la Mora: Lo que no vemos lo que nos mira https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/gabriel-de-la-mora-lo-que-vemos-lo-que-nos-mira/

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Artist: Gabriel de la Mora

Lo que no vemos lo que nos mira
October 18, 2014 – February 16, 2015
Museo Amparo
Puebla, Mexico

Exposición individual del artista Gabriel de la Mora. En conferencia con el curador Willy Kautz, se inaugura la muestra en Puebla, Mexico.

October 22, 2014 Gabriel de la Mora: Ruta Mística https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/gabriel-de-la-mora-ruta-mistica/

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Artists: Alfadir Luna, Antonio Paucar, David Gremard Romero, Gabriel de la Mora, Gabriel Rossell Santillán, Marcos Castro, María García-Ibáñez, Miler Lagos, Pedro Reyes, and Santiago Borja.

Ruta Mística
March 8 – May 5, 2014
Museo Amparo
Puebla, Mexico

La exposición organizada por el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey y curada por Gonzalo Ortega, presenta una revaloración de la noción del misticismo dentro del contexto latinoamericano actual a través de la obra de diez artistas que reflexionan sobre el modelo cultural poscolonial utilizando diversos medios como pintura, escultura, dibujo, fotografía, instalación y video.

La muestra colectiva incluye la obra de Alfadir Luna, Antonio Paucar, David Gremard Romero, Gabriel de la Mora, Gabriel Rossell Santillán, Marcos Castro, María García-Ibáñez, Miler Lagos, Pedro Reyes y Santiago Borja, quienes en su búsqueda de nuevos modelos ideológicos convincentes construyen sus propias identidades y canales de comunicación con lo trascendental al integrar aspectos ancestrales con otros nuevos elementos. En su mayoría se trata de propuestas conceptuales, resultado de la investigación y la recopilación de información.

En el caso de David Gremard Romero y Gabriel Rossell Santillán, su interés los ha llevado a revisar aspectos característicos de cultos de grupos indígenas. David Gremard se aboca a la cosmogonía y simbología azteca en El Tonalamatl Ollin, 2012, y a Gabriel Rossell, su investigación lo ha llevado a conocer de cerca la cultura huichol, dando como resultado la obra El quemado, 2013, y El primer hombre / Watakame (Archivo del Museo Etnológico de Dahlem), 2006.

La obra de Santiago Borja, SELF/Jungcatcher, 2013, banaliza los objetos rituales y cuestiona su valor espiritual, como es el caso de los “atrapa sueños”, objetos que han perdido su poder simbólico al popularizarse. Marcos Castro reflexiona sobre el mito fundacional de México y toma la figura del águila devorando a la serpiente como protagonista de su trabajo, como en la pieza de talavera Disuelve y coagula, 2012, y la instalación Sin título (águila), 2007.

Miler Lagos documenta la realidad actual, en su natal Colombia, de la ceiba, árbol sagrado para las culturas prehispánicas con una relevancia mística innegable, como en el video Nacidos antes de… (Intervención urbana, Cali, Colombia), 2009. Antonio Paucar erige un altar con sus propias manos en el video Altar, 2006, en donde las llamas de sus dedos representan algo inasible y mágico.

Alfadir Luna crea un mito en torno a un personaje ficticio con su proyecto de inserción social Procesión del Señor del maíz (Procesión para unir a un Hombre de maíz), 2011, en el cual involucra a los comerciantes y público del mercado de La Merced en la Ciudad de México. Pedro Reyes, por su parte, se inspira en Pico della Mirandola, pensador italiano renacentista, para realizar en piedra tallada, un gran monolito al que pueden insertarse pequeños ojos, cabellos, narices y bocas.

La muerte es invocada en la obra de Gabriel de la Mora y María García-Ibáñez. De la Mora recrea una reunión familiar con un estilo barroco tenebrista en la pieza Memoria I, 21.10.07, 2007, mientras que García-Ibáñez refiere el culto por los huesos al modelar con cerámica y con gran precisión piezas que luego decora con dibujos fusionando lo humano con lo místico en piezas como Huesos/Piedras/Flores, 2011 e Inmóviles, s/f.

*Images: Gabriel de la Mora, “Memory I”, 2007, Calcium sulfate with an application of cyanoacrylate, resin base, and stainless steel supports, Polyptych of 17 craniums, Dimensions variable.
March 17, 2014 Gabriel de la Mora https://abstractioninaction.com/artists/gabriel-de-la-mora/

Translated from Spanish

I always knew that when I would leave architecture, someday I would return to it, not as an architect, but as an artist. I do not consider myself a painter, sculptor, draftsman, or photographer. I find reducing art to one technique to be unfair. I am an artist who works with ideas, possibilities and concepts, where each work requires a particular technique. Since I was a child I have struggled to distinguish fantasy from reality; now I constantly try to transform figuration in abstraction and vice versa. I have always liked to surprise myself and surprise everyone else. When this is incorporated into the fact that the work leaves you thinking, the work becomes complete. I am interested in finding the balance between the formal and the conceptual; between the left and the right. I am left-handed and dyslexic, therefore I write backwards in a natural way since I was 4 years old, using the right hemisphere of the brain; where emotional expression, sign language, musical sensibility and artistic sensibility are located. I work, think and speak with numbers, information, counting, figures, in a repetitive, obsessive way, organized within chaos. I constantly seek originality through repetition; I like something to be universal and particular. I am at the same time minimalist and baroque. I have 6.5 cm between my two pupils. The first impression with any work of art will always be visual, as conceptual as this may be. Thus I am interested in experimenting with different ways of “seeing” that are not only through the eyes. To achieve this I often use psychics and blind people, since I am certain of the parallel that exists between a clairvoyant and an artist. I am drawn by paranormal phenomena, criminology, music and meditation, among many other things. I am interested in accumulating objects from 1860 to 1960, approximately, focused on photography and architectural elements, among others. I look for and find “things” that ceased to fulfill the function they were made for and before they are turned into waste, I negotiate them, exchange them or buy them to turn them into something else. My studio is a sort of laboratory where experimentation is fundamental to the process and development in series. All the processes are documented and are part of an archive. When I make a mistake, it is not fixed or patched up; the work is simply discarded and I begin another one from scratch. I like to question and create through a process of destruction. Also to create something to then undo it, then something that apparently does not take me anywhere ends up being the work itself, through the trace, the mark or the document that remains. Work produces work, work produces more work, and work also produces ideas and ideas generate more ideas and also more work. The workshop functions infinitely and circularly, with a team of people that go from the ordinary to the extraordinary. I buy, collect and accumulate a great diversity of archives that ultimately will be a work in themselves, or the raw material of different series to be developed. I write ideas, projects, phrases, words and quantities in my notebooks every day. I always work in different series or projects simultaneously, in some I have absolute control of the work, and in others everything is random. Some works are a 100% created in the studio, while others are found or transformed from garbage to something else. Time, gravity, fragility, waste, and accident are the constants in any series or any work. The energy factor of the works, the objects and the things in general is an important element, such that my definition of art is parallel to the definition of energy: Art is neither created nor destroyed, it can only be transformed.

 

Siempre supe que al dejar la arquitectura, algún día regresaría a ella, pero ya no más como arquitecto, sino como artista. No me considero pintor, escultor, dibujante, ni fotógrafo; reducir el arte a una técnica me parece injusto. Soy un artista que trabaja con ideas, posibilidades y conceptos, en donde cada obra pide una técnica en particular. Desde pequeño me ha costado diferenciar la fantasía de la realidad; ahora constantemente trato de transformar la figuración en abstracción y viceversa. Siempre me ha gustado sorprenderme y generar sorpresa en los demás, cuando esto se une a que la obra te deje pensando, se completa la pieza. Me interesa encontrar el balance entre lo formal y lo conceptual; entre la izquierda y la derecha. Soy zurdo y disléxico, por lo que escribo al revés desde los 4 años de forma natural, utilizando el hemisferio derecho del cerebro; en donde se localiza la expresión emocional, el lenguaje mímico, la sensibilidad musical y la sensibilidad artística. Trabajo, pienso y hablo con números, información, conteos, cifras, de una forma repetitiva, obsesiva y ordenada dentro de un caos. Busco constantemente la originalidad a través de la repetición, me gusta que algo sea universal y particular; soy minimalista y barroco al mismo tiempo. Tengo 6.5 cm entre cada una de mis dos pupilas. El primer impacto con cualquier obra de arte siempre será visual, por más conceptual que esta sea; por lo que me interesa experimentar con diversas formas de “ver”, que no sea únicamente con los ojos; para lograr esto suelo utilizar videntes e invidentes, ya que estoy seguro del paralelo que existe entre un vidente y un artista. Me llaman la atención los fenómenos paranormales, la criminología, la música y la meditación entre muchas cosas más. Me interesa acumular objetos que van de 1860 a 1960 aproximadamente, enfocados en fotografía y elementos arquitectónicos principalmente, entre muchos más. Busco y encuentro “cosas” que dejaron de cumplir su función para las que fueron hechas y antes de convertirse en un desecho, negociarlas, intercambiarlas o comprarlas para convertirlas en algo más. Mi estudio es una especie de laboratorio, en donde la experimentación es la parte fundamental en el proceso y desarrollo de serie. Todos los procesos quedan documentados y forman parte de un archivo. Cuando cometo un error, no se compone o parcha, simplemente la pieza se descarta y se comienza una nueva desde cero. Me gusta cuestionar y crear mediante de un proceso de destrucción, así como también hacer algo para después deshacerlo y lo que aparentemente no me lleva a nada, en realidad es la obra en sí, a través de la huella, la marca o el registro que queda. El trabajo genera trabajo, el trabajo genera más trabajo, el trabajo genera también ideas y las ideas generan más ideas y a la vez también más trabajo, y así infinitamente y en círculo es la forma en la que funciona el taller, con un equipo de personas que van de lo ordinario a lo extraordinario. Compro, colecciono y acumulo una gran diversidad de archivos que al final serán una obra en sí o la materia prima de diversas series por desarrollar. Todos los días escribo en mis cuadernos ideas, proyectos, frases, palabras y cantidades. Siempre trabajo en varias series o proyectos al mismo tiempo, en algunos tengo un control absoluto de la pieza, en otros todo queda al azar. Algunas obras son creadas al 100% en el estudio, mientras otras son encontradas o transformadas de un desecho a algo más. El tiempo, la gravedad, la fragilidad, el desecho, el accidente, son constantes el cualquier serie o en cualquier pieza. El factor energético de las piezas, de los objetos y las cosas en general es un elemento importante, tanto así que mi definición de arte es un paralelo a la definición de energía: El arte ni se crea ni se destruye, tan solo se transforma.

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October 5, 2013