XYZ

If we start from the possibility of the mutation of form, which alters the materialization of knowledge, we find ourselves in a house inhabited by sausages. Perhaps we feel sympathy or repulsion, shock or confusion, we will traverse a room in which the absurd, practical sense, and matter push us toward an existential abyss. The sausages in this room present a humanistic baggage, a latent breath, a simulacrum that defies obedience to biological order. The forms and the dwelling of these figures challenge the laws of gravity, evidencing the fragile relationship between the body, matter, and architecture.

XYZ is a project in which meat is enhanced as a meta-state and not merely as a physical confection. By using irony as an analytical tool, Gabriel Rico questions the absence of awareness and identity in a panorama saturated with leisure, stimuli, and artifices. The inability for self-analysis turns humans into a piece of meat similar to a sausage. Thus, the pieces of 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 room 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 incidence called putrefaction. Bacteria begin to populate the brass skeleton that was once a foreign home, transforming the precious house of gold—empty from an anthropocentric perspective—into a diverse bacterial ecosystem.

The return of Gabriel Rico's work to his city of residence after 9 years offers visitors a humorous opportunity to activate the power of self-identification and questioning through the installation. Starting from his first exhibition in collaboration with Cerámica Suro, in The Discipline of The Cave (2019, Aspen Art Museum), the floor again becomes the landscape and organic sustenance of the pieces. The artist's fascination with philosophical analogies, scientific disciplines, and the development of ontological methodologies leads him to interpret Plataforma as a straight 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.