GABRIEL DE LA MORA: ÉLAN VITAL
Perrotin is pleased to present Élan Vital by Gabriel de la Mora at Perrotin Paris. In this new exhibition, the artist presents two bodies of work, both exhibited for the first time in France, highlighting the subtleties and textures found in nature, both organic and inorganic.
March 9 – April 6, 2024
For the presentation in Paris, the artist debuts a new body of work composed using the inorganic material of obsidian, a unique volcanic glass which has both a solid matte surface and a black mirrored surface. In the adjacent galleries, De la Mora presents his recent series Lepidoptera, composed entirely of organic material in the form of ethically sourced butterfly wings. Presented together, these two bodies of work encourage viewers to consider what life is composed of, what is this Élan Vital?
The idea of the existence of a vital force that separates living beings from ordinary matter is ancient and persists to this day. At the beginning of the 20th, Henri Bergson introduced Elan Vital as a concept to name that impetus that distinguishes living bodies, and allows this energy to be explained as more something more than just an emergent characteristic of matter when it reaches a certain degree of complexity.
In his quest to explain the division between living and inorganic matter, Bergson points out the characteristics that differentiate living beings from the rest of the objects, in a direction contrary to the exploration that Gabriel de la Mora undertakes with his artistic practice, traversing the necessary paths to show reality as a continuum, where all entities coexist on the same level, much like how, for example, in the field of painting he unites polychrome and monochrome.
Life is will, it is the desire to create that awakens in the consciousness of the living being and in its ability to act on the environment. This is not an exclusive task of the spirit, consciousness exists in the materiality of the body, and it is the body that allows manipulation of objects.
In this exhibition there is organic material –butterfly wings– that, although they have lost their vital force, accumulate the evolutionary history of the species, and inorganic material –supreme golden obsidian–, that results of violent eruptions followed by accelerated cooling.
The author’s creative impetus is expressed in the organization of carefully selected fragments to show a specific configuration of each object, a configuration that in the case of the supreme golden obsidian pieces pursues the transition between figuration and abstraction and, contrary to what Bergson would believe, do not show an arbitrarily chosen final state, but rather a time that unfolds in front of the spectator: a movement of the viewer or a subtle change in lighting is enough to trigger a new flow in the appearance of these artworks that evoke the process of constant change of life, which is not a state but a tendency, a persistent desire, a power of transformation that is always on the verge of being realized.