Gabriel Rico

Plataforma presents XYZ by Gabriel Rico in collaboration with Cerámica Suro..

XYZ is a project in which flesh is empowered as a meta-state and not as a mere physical confection. By using irony as an analytical tool, Gabriel Rico questions the absence of consciousness and identity in a panorama saturated with leisure, stimuli and artifices. The inability to self-analyze turns humans into a sausage-like piece of meat. Thus, the pieces in the exhibition represent critical gestures of contemporary life and the danger of getting lost in a world of material objects. The exploration of space is crucial in the artist's work, who understands the exhibition hall as Plato's cave: a refuge and a conquest of personal territory. In “Future People Will Maintain Plutonium Here” (2024), time passes in a chaotic incident called putrefaction. Bacteria begin to populate the brass skeleton that was once a foreign home, transforming the precious golden house – empty from an anthropocentric perspective – into a diverse bacterial ecosystem.

The return of Gabriel Rico’s work to his home city after 9 years offers visitors a humorous opportunity to activate the power of self-identification and questioning through installation. Starting with his first exhibition in collaboration with Cerámica Suro, in The Discipline of The Cave (2019, Aspen Art Museum), the ground once again becomes the landscape and organic support for the pieces. The artist’s fascination with philosophical analogies, scientific disciplines, and the development of ontological methodologies leads him to interpret Plataforma as a rectilinear plane, where he organizes the pieces in a Cartesian handling of Euclidean space. XYZ invites us to understand Cartesian coordinates as compasses of a collective territory that is life.

— Plataforma