GABRIEL RICO: A FINGER POINTING TO THE MOON
Perrotin New York is pleased to present Guadalajara-based artist Gabriel Rico’s solo exhibition, titled A Finger Pointing to the Moon.
June 28 – August 1, 2025
Characterized by the interrelation of seemingly disparate objects, Rico reflects on the relationship between humans and our environment. His installations integrate irony and poetry through the combination of natural and man-made forms, prompting an awareness of their asymmetry to reveal cultural and political flaws. Through object-making, assemblage-based installations, and a keen understanding of material processes, Rico achieves a precise geometry from his carefully chosen objects.
Several works in the exhibition are architecturally contingent, if not site-specific, hinging on structural elements within the gallery. Take, for example, Arquitectura (Ceramic Sausage), a sausage that is comically positioned on one of the gallery’s columns as a meditation on our dependence on the built environment. A cartoonish stand-in for human presence, each Arquitectura signifies what it means to be bound, or hamstrung, to a particular site and its infrastructure. Each sausage figure is personified in its depiction, in different physical positions, held captive in the gallery.
This conflation of human and non-human experience is integral to Rico’s notion of a heuristic ontology, in which human-centered ideas can be recalibrated to emphasize each object’s precarious status. Suspended in the center of the gallery is Nearness, a monumental sculpture that depicts two skeletal figures in an embrace, both covered in glass sausages. The skeletons hang from interlocking chains that symbolize a love that upholds body and spirit. The individual hotdog forms playfully punctuate the bones of the skeletons, animating these figures whose fragility resides in the liminal spaces between life and death, the archaeological and the contemporary.
Finally, the components of Rico’s central sculpture Human Prayer provide a tabula rasa for viewers to project their aspirations. Working with a totem of stones sourced from the Mexican landscape, Human Prayer is scaled to the height of a human figure, magically upheld by golden arrows from every direction. While these arrows are fabricated tools, stones are a primal material extracted from the earth, foundational in constructing the built environment. The artist’s yearning for both a shared history and a collective imagination imbues his recent work with a sense of openness, inviting viewers to project their own experiences and reflect on their relationship to people, ideas, and objects.