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Pequod Co. is pleased to present the second solo exhibition by Cristóbal Gracia at the gallery. To accompany the exhibition, curator Roselin Rodríguez Espinosa offers a text that reflects on Gracia’s practice, contextualizing his exploration of political and cultural symbolism.
Dust
Dust is a cemetery that holds what has been forgotten and the remnants of the bodies we once were. It harbors our broken hopes, what we failed to see, what fell and shattered into a thousand pieces. It is also the dwelling place of all language that once had a legitimate existence, and the final resting place—perhaps—of what we understand as culture. Among the particles that compose it, an ideal world survives without hierarchies or dominions, an accumulation of disordered codes that can suffocate breath, blur vision, and restore an awareness of time—both upon surfaces and in the gentle passing of time when light pierces the air and reveals its floating composition. Dust does not lie, but it conceals everything.
The Pearl
A pearl is nothing more than a defense mechanism against the danger and uncertainty that threatens from the outside. It is an antidote, a gleaming armor built in darkness, awakening in our eyes an obscene fascination when revealed. All it takes is for an exogenous element to enter an oyster—perhaps a speck of dust—meticulously transform it into a marvel. It translates it, twists its code, and turns it into something else, into pure surface that renders its center, its reason, absent. Most pearls are irregular, baroque, and capricious. Often discarded as luxury objects, they are relegated to the realm of costume jewelry. Their baroqueness unsettles; it does not satisfy the ambition for symmetry demanded by their consumption as precious gems. Their container is the soft mucosa of the appetizing mollusk and the intimate fantasy of a pearly cavity.
The Knife
In a world as ravaged as ours, condemned by the anxiety for possession, oysters are pried open with knives to be consumed one after another—whether in a city restaurant or in the voracious pursuit of the pearled treasures the mollusk keeps. This practice is also repeated across thousands of pearl farms worldwide—in China, the United States, Thailand, Australia, Japan, Vietnam, the Caribbean, and Mexico—where pearls are managed into their shaped daily, and the whims of baroque irregularity are strangled. The knife becomes a weapon of domination, violently confronting another mechanism of protection. Fear seeks out fear: the pearl and the knife are made of the same element. The phrase encoded by Shakespeare in The Merry Wives of Windsor to speak of the power of force in obtaining what is desired—which lends its title to this exhibition—returns here, laden with the material reality of the rampant exploitation of this natural resource today.
Cristóbal Gracia presents a series of works that interconnect these elements to propose a critical reflection on certain historically entrenched values attached to objects—values that often shape contemporary cultural and artistic consumption and have even defined what is considered art today, usually at the intersection of popular and mass culture or within the domains of reproduction and replication.
At various points in his career, the artist has addressed artifice and theatricality as inherent conditions in the staging of what is understood as “culture”—from Hollywood’s depictions on the Acapulco coast to grotesque style decor that have adorned Western gardens since the 15th century. In his projects he has consistently linked how replicas and artificial designs, which fictionalize the natural world or imitate iconic sculptures from cultural history—David, Venus de Milo, Buddha, or Mussolini—creating a kind of “second nature” that is entirely surface and demands from us new metabolic systems. In many ways, Gracia’s work has unveiled new forms of this contemporary ecology, the processes through which it has emerged, and the unsuspected ways of adapting to it—even as an indigestible ingestion.
This exhibition marks a key moment in a long-term research, as it directly addresses a fundamental concern: the disordering and blending of opposing cultural codes, as embodied in a baroque sensibility that rejects hierarchical value distinctions among cultural objects. The works presented combine pop iconography with neoliberal subjectivity reduced to detritus, trough juxtaposing disparate found objects from urban popular culture—crushed, digested—alongside archaeological materials and their obligatory replicas, tourist souvenirs, black-market trinkets, and popular toys that expose illusions of class. This accumulation integrates plaster cast reproductions of classical sculptures—once used as academic models at the San Carlos Academy—which, to a great extent, have underpinned the construction of the notion of art in modernity since the 19th century.
For this exhibition, the gallery space has been transformed into the interior of a jewelry box reminiscent of a camera obscura, where the artworks appear as mutations in the pearl-formation process. The three sculptures—The Adam, The Dust Lint, and Assoluta—depict three moments in a sequence of accumulating fragments of residual urban cultural objects, emerging from their shell and artificial cultivation box. Their surfaces withdraw authority from the icons and pulverizes them—turning them into an amalgam of excesses that constructs a new structure and form. These processes resonate with contemporary baroque theories by authors such as Severo Sarduy and Bolívar Echeverría. For Sarduy, baroque cosmology acknowledges an origin but also recognizes its absence, understanding the world as pure surface. “The echo precedes the voice,” he once stated. In Gracia’s works, one might say that dust precedes the pearl and the knife.
In dialogue with these sculptures, a series of panels reminiscent of a colonial altarpiece unfold a kind of material, technical, and symbolic map of the exhibition, ominously merging two cultural universes: on one side, a bas-relief plaster tracing of the distorted forms of academic sculpture models; on the other, an encapsulation of tiny mother-of-pearl figures of vernacular origin, together forming a fantasy of suspended corpuscles. The pearlescent section is crafted using a centuries-old artisanal technique dating back to the colonial era, where in painted images are overlaid with fragments of mother-of-pearl. The binding agent used is the traditional black adhesive made from charred sheep bone, giving it an irregular texture reminiscent of petrified dust evoking the darkness of Baroque painting—those empty spaces where images were truly constructed in paintings, as seen in the works of Caravaggio.
These pieces, along with others created using graphic techniques, develop shared ideas and questions across various media. They transform recognizable cultural references into elements of the indistinct matter of dust, reshaping surfaces to disrupt their values and question their principles of identity. The production of the works mirrors this principle of repurposing discarded materials, reintegrating everything into new forms to affirm that every container is also content, and every residue, a potential new body.
In this way, Gracia’s proposal allows contemporary art to raise questions about the conditions of production, distribution, and consumption of its commodities, reflecting on luxury and its associations with excess, waste, and emptiness. Just as Assoluta, where its dimensions, by exceeding the human scale, suggests an emancipation from its shell and the acquisition of autonomy, one might ask: What implications and possibilities arise when excess and consumption’s residuals are assumed as new surface, form, and material in art? What is considered valuable, and what, in contrast, is deemed mere remnants? Under what conditions does an object acquire the status of luxury? Beyond being assemblages of materials, are we also faced with amalgamations of different types of value—use, exchange, and symbolic? In the current Mexican cultural policy landscape, where the art market has taken a dominant role in constructing value at the expense of public institutions, how can we critically reflect on the formation of value and the narrative struggles of contemporary art in relation to luxury consumption, identity production, and residual culture?
- Roselin Rodríguez
Further reading here.
Special thanks to; Taller Orígenes, TORCHSLUSSPANIK, Jesús Gracia, Óscar Garduño, Francisco Vega, Alejandro Reyes, Luciana Astuto, El taller de Mike, TAJO Taller, Llamas a Mi, Roselin Rodríguez, Diana Mariani, Montserrat Pazos, Juliana Peralta, Mariana Rascón, Susana Estrada, Mau Galguera & María García Sainz.
