And how will the artist capture and preserve the fleeting moment?
Adolfo Riestra. Original quote translated into English
This modest effort to exhibit his Body of Work is declared partial. No exhaustive or definitive review was attempted. These signs are offered separately, like a game that allows for the reassembly of another body, the reinvention of another form and another and another. This exhibition is a remembrance.
His drawings teem with outlawed bodies; they form a revolutionary somateca*—both for his time, the 80s, and ours—by demanding a disidentification. These beings refuse the construction of a stable ego, resist identity labels, and flee fixation through contradiction: they are immobile inks chasing the lightness and mutability of the wind.
This somateca is filled with monstrous and beautiful inventions: arms stretching to deformity, twisted torsos, swollen thighs, enlarged genitals, steroidal breasts, falling, delicate buttocks, hermaphroditic creatures. Everything in his drawings is flawed, abject desire, capricious forms. His drawings don’t oppose beauty; they implant it with new standards: his song is that of a bird few understand.
Excerpt from Curatorial Text for Cuerpo de Obra, Mauricio Marcin
* The term "somateca," coined by Paul B. Preciado, describes how bodies act as living archives shaped by discourses, practices, and power technologies, transforming identity and subjectivity.
Adolfo shares—alongside many others—the recognition of this political and aesthetic operation. His body of work is a cry in the middle of a crater, a crater that becomes a beach, a pleasure that becomes death, a spiral.
Excerpt from Curatorial Text for Cuerpo de Obra, Mauricio Marcin
Whenever Adolfo mastered a pictorial style, he abandoned it, rejecting its mastery, as the controllable and predictable ceased to offer him a spectrum of possibilities, as if his desire was satisfied.
Excerpt from Curatorial Text for Cuerpo de Obra, Mauricio Marcin
Working with clay—a tradition deeply rooted in both western and eastern Mexico—has always sparked my curiosity and driven me to explore the essence of fantastical figures emerging from the moist, moldable earth. Like a hollow gourd, the clay is kneaded and shaped, always leaving breathing spaces, surrounded by a delicate, pastry-thin surface. At the same time, its construction is a form of architecture, requiring walls and vaults, tunnels, and spacious halls, where windows, chimneys, and porticoes connect with the outside world.
Adolfo Riestra. Original quote translated into English.
Adolfo was an intensely passionate person. Everything in his world held deep meaning, allowing no room for half-measures or lukewarm feelings. He lived, loved, cooked, ate, drew, painted, and sculpted with this fervor—defying all odds, whether we liked it or understood it. His work ethic was the same: intense and relentless.
Adolfo Riestra, Galería OMR, Mexico City, 1994.
With clay, you can conceal a ruby... The art of working with clay—a long-standing tradition in both western and eastern Mexico—has always piqued my curiosity, driving my desire to uncover the essence of fantastical figures emerging from the moist, moldable earth. Hollow like a gourd, clay is kneaded and shaped, always leaving breathing spaces, surrounded by a surface as thin as pastry. This process resembles architecture, requiring walls and vaults, tunnels and hallways, spacious rooms with windows, chimneys, and porticoes connecting to the outside.
Clay sculpture is an exploration of inner forms, an adventure through infinite expanses, a journey to depths where imagination freely evolves. Unknown individuals' shapes, volumes, and gestures emerge—faces with long, wide noses, hands with slender fingers, and sometimes mysterious, coarse hands forming characters with unique personalities.
—Living inside a figure is more fascinating than seeing it from the outside.
Adolfo Riestra, “Con barro se puede tapar un rubí…”. Original quote translated into English.
"Since I can remember, my brother was always drawing or painting with whatever was available: he experimented humorously on all kinds of surfaces, creating incredible things like collages or even mixing paint with beans. His works resulted in images that I thought were masterpieces at the time."
Jaime Riestra, Publication "OMR", 2019. Ed. Turner Libros.
Adolfo had to invent in each drawing what he wished existed in reality; through a symbolic-demiurgic operation, he made each painting lavish consistency on the world and the fact is that to make art is to bring forth the space one wishes to inhabit.
Excerpt from Curatorial Text for Cuerpo de Obra, Mauricio Marcin
Monos del Espacio [Space Monkeys] is a synthesis of 20 years of work and research on the relationship between nature and culture. It’s a story built from hundreds of other stories about the search for meaning in a complex world. Tales of interconnection between humans and their environment, narrated through endless clues that reveal every detail of the characters inhabiting it.
At the intersection of art and science, Monos del Espacio presents a scientific and artistic process where observation, experimentation, and reflection converge to unveil new perspectives on our reality. On this cosmic journey, Rico reminds us that truth is relative and reality is subjective. We are part of the universe, yet also observers of ourselves, containing an equally infinite universe within.
Ultimately, Monos del Espacio is a reflection on the human condition, inviting us to immerse ourselves in life’s complexity, ceaselessly seeking meaning in our surroundings.
Welcome to question, explore, and reflect on this assembly of meanings.
Monos del Espacio [Space Monkeys] is a synthesis of 20 years of work and research on the relationship between nature and culture. It’s a story built from hundreds of other stories about the search for meaning in a complex world. Tales of interconnection between humans and their environment, narrated through endless clues that reveal every detail of the characters inhabiting it.
At the intersection of art and science, Monos del Espacio presents a scientific and artistic process where observation, experimentation, and reflection converge to unveil new perspectives on our reality. On this cosmic journey, Rico reminds us that truth is relative and reality is subjective. We are part of the universe, yet also observers of ourselves, containing an equally infinite universe within.
Ultimately, Monos del Espacio is a reflection on the human condition, inviting us to immerse ourselves in life’s complexity, ceaselessly seeking meaning in our surroundings.
Welcome to question, explore, and reflect on this assembly of meanings.
Gabriel Rico’s series Fish begin to stink bythe head continues his exploration of howour surroundings shape not only health,
but also human psychology, as well as oureternal quest for happiness. By assemblingvarious objects chosen for their symbolicpower into anthropomorphic agglomerates,Rico creates sculptures that evoke a strangeempathy towards the non-living.
For Rico, materials function as analogies for oneof the main themes in his work: the fragmentationof the contemporary human being. The syntax ofthis sculpture reflects on just how humanoid aprecise combination of materials and objects canbe, and on the empathy, awakened in the viewerwhen these materials and objects are arranged ina certain way.
Gabriel Rico’s work featuring a skeleton on
a sausage reduces the complexity of thehuman condition to mere flesh. Enjoying theride with raised arms and dangling legs, theskeleton conveys a carefree attitude towardsthe pressing discourses and crises thatdefine our contemporary reality.
For some time, Gabriel Rico was looking for atechnique that would allow him to translate theaesthetic of his sculptures into a two dimensionalformat. Seeking a way to harness the visualpower and the essence of his pieces, he chose atechnique known as nierika: The yarn paintingswere produced by Wixárika artisans in the village of San Andrés Cohamitata, located in thehighlands of northern Jalisco in Mexico.
The piece titled "Architecture", is composed from 2 elements joined in a visual analogy about the relationship between men and architecture and the assumption that without one, the meaning of existence of the other is questionable. - To evidence the importance of Matter to define space- A chop tied with hemp wire to a brick to represent the emotional part of inhabiting a space and the figurative sense of the bond that is created in doing so. A branch suspended from the wall gives the guideline for its location and of the brick, to locate them in space and create a symbiosis such as it happens when projecting a measure on the space to generate a scale, a guideline for the dimension.
The holographic principle is a principle of superstring theories about quantum gravity theories proposed in 1993 by Gerard ‘t Hooft, and improved and promoted by Leonard Susskind in 1995. It postulates that all the information contained in a certain volume of a particular space can be known from the encodable information on the boundary of that region. An important consequence is that the maximum amount of information that can be contained in a given region of space surrounded by a differentiable surface is limited by the total area of that surface. It is this principle that I use as a starting point in the development of the pieces that make up this series, in which I am interested in the assumption that there can be contamination filtered into reality, from the time it takes for a hologram to materialize into a real object, i.e. in principle a coyote or deer can be composed materially by the elements traditionally found in them, such as hair, teeth, horns, tail, etc.. But as they materialize they absorb some elements that coexist with them, which triggers a mutation on the condition of information in the current world, in this specific case what is absorbed are symbols with certain values used in some exact sciences, such as mathematics, physics or trigonometry.
"The holographic principle is a principle of superstring theories about quantum gravity theories proposed in 1993 by Gerard ‘t Hooft, and improved and promoted by Leonard Susskind in 1995. It postulates that all the information contained in a certain volume of a particular space can be known from the encodable information on the boundary of that region. An important consequence is that the maximum amount of information that can be contained in a given region of space surrounded by a differentiable surface is limited by the total area of that surface. It is this principle that I use as a starting point in the development of the pieces that make up this series, in which I am interested in the assumption that there can be contamination filtered into reality, from the time it takes for a hologram to materialize into a real object, i.e. in principle a coyote or deer can be composed materially by the elements traditionally found in them, such as hair, teeth, horns, tail, etc.. But as they materialize they absorb some elements that coexist with them, which triggers a mutation on the condition of information in the current world, in this specific case what is absorbed are symbols with certain values used in some exact sciences, such as mathematics, physics or trigonometry." Gabriel Rico
Gabriel Rico’s visual lexicon is comprised ofimagery of everyday objects taken from ourcollective memory. Recurrent in his work areimages of natural and man-made objects likecacti, taxidermy, knives, sporting balls, goldcoins, feathers and other natural elements,among others.
Through the extroversion of elements related toeveryday life, Rico proposes a mental game inwhich the viewer projects their desires, interestsand ideals on the cactus, therefore forming a newentity that is neither plant nor animal, subject tothe meanings that the objects embedded in thecactus have today.