Not Fish, Snake Scale



—Garcia | Galería
—Madrid
—2017

[Installation shot at Galeria Francisco Fino, Lisbon, 2017]
—All images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Galeria Francisco Fino

LINK
LINK
LINK






No Fish, Snake Scale is a sentence from the film “Blade Runner”. It also points to the themes that run through the work and which are of primary interest to the artist: the relationship between the artificial and the natural; the organic and the technological; the machine; the body; ergonomics… For his third solo show at the gallery Gil has designed a fragmented stage from which to imagine a new relational model between man and machine through a living ecosystem of works in the space. In this way, he blurs the line between the organic and the artificial to reflect upon knowledge production processes of contemporary sculpture, its hybridisation with new technology, and natural and industrial manufacturing processes.

Gil brings up to date one of his most iconic series, Redundancy (de-extinction), with two works made out of recycled industrial neon signs from Hong Kong that have been replaced with new LED technology. The Absent Body of the Rider is rooted in minimalism’s sculptural principles to reflect upon the border between the positive and negative that is used in industrial sculptural processes. Using numerical control, he imprints the negative of two motorcycle tanks from different periods into high density foam that is commonly used for aerodynamic prototypes. We find a similar semantic turn in the work Vientre de Máquina, where two industrial tailpieces manufactured in a tune-up workshop on the outskirts of Madrid have been covered in raw leather, emulating animal skin. Flat Bones is made up of four sculptures that make up an artificial skeleton of sorts, manufactured in stainless steel and pointing to different body parts (legs, torso, collar bone, arm).Concurrently, Gil alludes to the Burmester stencils –used to decorate ornaments and cone curves–in two new sculptures under the title French Curve, where two different versions of the Peugeot lion logo (found on car models from the 30s and 50s) allude to different versions of the same referent. The obvious formal and stylistic distance marked by the different manufacturing periods come into conflict with the uniform way they are exhibited.


publications presscv contact  HOME