Gabriel de la Mora: Sujeto / Objeto

The Intimacy of Difference

Carolina Estrada García

The artist-gatherer has the power to create monuments to present-day memory by utilizing the most precarious materials. In their work, they respond to the voice of things and, through the daily observation of minimal, seemingly insignificant details, they find treasure in everyday objects. Their gaze lingers on small things that usually go unnoticed in order to reconstruct the texture of the world, each fragment a part of a formal pattern. They find signs of a broader whole within liminal spaces and ensure that materials retain their own potential meaning.

Over time and with patience, Gabriel de la Mora has worked with a wide variety of materials, revealing new connections through an impeccable methodology. The artist cultivates an existential vision of differentiated totality, made up of a series of practices and routines, philosophical meditations, and her own personal experience. At the same time, by focusing her attention on each object, the artist herself has also become composed of an infinite number of eggshell fragments, turkey feathers, butterfly wings, blown-glass spheres, and other materials which she uses in her artistic and personal life. From a material perspective, the artist is an interlocutor in a dialogue with the objects that she uses and which she transforms in order to create herself by creating art. The artist evokes (from the Latin evocare, “to call forth”) materials that are transformed from within, entering into a conversation with them and allowing the materials themself to acquire meaning. Through her process of ordering reality, things inhabit the world around us and appear outside.

De la Mora produces almost imperceptible cracks in her seemingly monochromatic works, inviting us to consider the underlying structures that compose them. Behind the textured whites are thousands of hours of work, sleepless nights, countless books, and solitary conversations with herself. In this way, the artist’s hands, which continuously, repetitively clean, sand, cut, count, arrange, and glue things, also become part of each painting, imbuing life into objects that, despite appearing immobile, are anything but silent. In De la Mora’s work, the materials speak, telling their own story. Objects and the world around them leap from the intimacy of difference, the threshold that sustains the intermediate as a dimension of life, presenting themselves to those willing to find the enchanting beauty of the insignificant.

However, as Gilles Deleuze wrote in Difference and Repetition, the repetition of actions and fragments always contains differences within it itself. Repetition differs, and thus no eggshell or colored turkey feather, no movement of her hands and none of the artworks that De la Mora creates are completely identical. Within repetition, everything can be different, a play of differences organized according to the underlying unity of the whole. This rhizomatic process is a staging of decentralized structures, opening up new possibilities for a visual and intellectual articulation between an internal subjectivity and the external world. De la Mora’s artworks do not begin in the center but instead are built around the margins, taking on an ordered form from their multiplicity and adapting to what is around them. Within order and methodical repetition, other organic forms of art coexist, like vines that grow horizontally but always follow the same patterns in diverse ways.

In the end, Gabriel de la Mora’s work contains the wonderful discoveries she has gathered over the years. Each piece surprises us in its recombination of small fragments, which, in their deep singularity, form an inseparable part of a whole that confers upon them meaning, reinventing them. The artist distinguishes between bright colors and creates vibrant forms, but she also composes with shades of white that are almost imperceptibly distinct to the naked eye, and whose contours are what catches our attention. In this way, the artist finds meaning where there appears to be none. She creates a series of relationships between subject and object that are inserted into the structures that support what is hidden, and where new ways of feeling and thinking about the world are invented.

January 10 – February 21, 2026

Press Release