Dust of Late Capitalism and Final Judgment Jewelry: Cristóbal Gracia at Pequod Co.

In the often-cited Thesis IX On the Concept of History, Walter Benjamin mentions Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus. This fragment constructs an allegory of progress: a winged angel looks toward the past while a storm propels it into the future, unable to stop. The movement leaves behind a singular catastrophe that reaches the heavens. This image has been used to interpret various cultural and political phenomena within the epistemic framework of modernity and the ideology of the new. That unstoppable angel can either reveal our unresolved doom or the possibility of critique, as in its backward gaze lies the urge to judge production, while simultaneously producing its own barbarity.

If Klee's painting visualizes the inevitable danger of fascism and the historical production of the ideology of the new, Cristóbal Gracia's Perlas barrocas cultivadas; el mundo es una ostra, que se abre con cuchillo [Baroque Cultured Pearls; The World is an Oyster, Opened with a Knife], at Pequod Co., is the wreckage-strewn hurricane that progress has left in its wake.

The post-Shakespearean exhibition begins, like almost everything, in the classical era—when the world was populated by gods, and humans made marble and ivory statues in their honor. Then, later, when they created plaster imitations to stay close to the power—the power given by the value of the cult that transformed them into empty fetishes laden with meaning that we ourselves have since forgotten.

The exhibition consists of three life-sized pearls, a heliography series that illustrates cultural change and the genesis of a pearl, three materially significant—if not aesthetically pleasing—paintings, and a photograph created as an invitation.

The pieces are difficult to observe: materially, there is no way to exhaust the object through vision alone. The accumulation overwhelms both understanding and perception, leaving us to explore the pearls as singular modules of cultural gestures in a playful and nostalgic arrangement. Baroque, for both the artist and curator Roselin Espinosa, has more to do with the atomization of the cosmos than with the fold. The works, therefore, expose a critique of historically constituted value but not of the world as a surface whose origin is absent, as the curatorial text suggests. This baroque has a clear origin and mocks itself in parodies that function through the accumulation of significant layers: from classical antiquity to flea market trinkets. In this maneuver, the Western idea of progress is speculatively imagined as mere dust without history. Though one may recognize fragments of the dust, within these works, every element is decontextualized and presented as a form of cultural neutrality—whether it's Neptune’s fountain, a column, Laocoön’s lost arm, Legos, paracetamol, Cupid with masks, horses, the American dollar, or Michelangelo’s Night.

Gracia’s work improvises with the contingencies of what is culturally valuable. The central metaphor of the exhibition is the pearl, whose origin can be thought of as the coalesced pus of oysters that humans found beautiful. Cycles of taste are as arbitrary as they are interesting.

Gracia takes nature’s process of hardening through accumulation to unravel the aesthetic history of forms. He extrapolates the obsolescence of plaster casts to commodities—to any material object that can be sold at a flea market. The strength of his work is proportional to the anxiety induced by generating general equivalences for every cultural object. While it’s true that any object can be revalued, there is something unsettling about existing within the system of general equivalences that capitalism demands.

This anxiety intensifies when, at some point during the exhibition, you realize that the entire gallery space is lined with black felt, as if we were inside a luxury ring box. To be in the exhibition is to be the parasite, the customer in the store, and the abandoned object left in the storm of history. What these works reveal in their capitalist baroque style is not the obsolescence of fashion, culture, or jewelry—though one could read them ironically this way—but the immediacy of the final judgment. The pieces poetically allegorize humanity’s march toward catastrophe as a natural, inevitable movement.

— M.S. Yániz

Translated to English by Luis Sokol.