GABRIEL DE LA MORA: REPEATED ORIGINAL

PERROTIN is pleased to present Repeated Original by Gabriel de la Mora.

March 5 - April 11, 2026

Throughout his career, the artist has developed an exploration of painting without paint: planes that retain pictorial qualities but dispense with the pigments traditionally associated with the medium. In this pursuit, he has worked with materials taken directly from nature—human hair, butterfly wings, bird feathers, obsidian, andesite, eggshell—as well as repurposed materials—shoe soles, bicycle inner tubes, glass microscope slides. Far from neutral, these materials carry histories, whether embedded in their DNA, in their chemical composition, or the marks left by use and wear.

The works gathered in Original Repetido exemplify a practice based on repetitive processes, understood as a form of active meditation. Repetition here is continuity and, at the same time, transformation: it does not operate as a style, but as an evolutionary mechanism, as if each series were a species in the process of change. The original series gradually moved away from monochrome to incorporate geometric patterns interspersed with fragments of eggshells of varying sizes and hues. In 2019, the artist replaced the eggshells with aluminum-coated spherical glass.

This change in material also implies an optical shift. While the eggshell scatters light diffusely and haphazardly, the aluminized glass reflects it specularly, producing recognizable, albeit unstable, images. By working with concave and convex surfaces, De la Mora introduces distortions that generate an illusion of depth and a fragmentation of the visual field. The reflections move in opposite directions, a phenomenon the artist calls visual dyslexia, in which the image appears off-center, inverted, or fractured.

Due to their scale, some of these works create an immersive experience. The glass pieces generate a kind of self-portrait in which the viewer takes the artist's place. The resulting image is far removed from a selfie, that ubiquitous genre of our time: it is a multiplicity of fragments that, by alternating sections of glass, invert and separate, creating planes that produce a sense of estrangement, similar to the moment of seeing oneself reflected in a mirror.

As the form of the works changes, so does their visual regime: these pieces are situated in an intermediate territory between surface and object, where painting and sculpture coexist.