As humans, we’re driven—almost as an obsession—to measure and contain the world through linguistic, mathematical and material structures that offer a sense of orientation, however arbitrary, in our search for meaning. Following his participation in the Venice Biennale two years ago and several institutional presentations worldwide, Mexican artist Gabriel Rico has built an international reputation through his seemingly absurdist, playful cosmologies of objects and enigmatic material equations. His work reflects on the relationship between humans and their environment, the enduring tension between civilization and nature and the fragile balance between order and chaos that runs through both.
At the core of his Guadalajara-based practice is a profound inquiry into the fabric of human existence in this particular space and time, aimed at revealing “the mundanity of the humans” and the correct aesthetic and mathematical equation to turn this into beauty, contemplating our limited position and agency within the broader dynamics of a cosmic order. The title of his recent exhibition at Gallerie Perrotin in New York, “A Finger Pointing to the Moon,” gestures toward this perspective, suggesting the relativity of any position we might adopt in attempting to read and make sense of our surroundings.
Although in his works Rico confronts some of the most profound philosophical and scientific questions—essentially “What is the point of living?”—irony is his preferred tool and strategy in his visual lexicon. “It’s ironic that I can use found objects to create equations that reflect on the human condition,” he tells Observer as we discuss the show in relation to his broader practice. “The irony isn’t just a twisted or clever way to look at ourselves from the outside—it’s a tool that lets you be critical of yourself and then step outside yourself again to be critical once more.” Irony allows you to go beyond your limits and then return to those limits with a renewed perception, Rico reflects. “Yes, irony is playful, but why can I be playful? Because I use irony and humor as a kind of infratext, a universal language, to build a bridge between my vision and that of others.”
Slices of mortadella float in space, pierced like Saint Sebastian against the wall. Rico’s signature sausages appear too, with Arquitectura (Ceramic Sausage) wrapped as if in a strange sexual ritual atop the gallery’s columns or precariously entangled with glass skeletons. He agrees that encountering his work can feel like seeing the world with fresh eyes, like a child discovering it for the first time without the weight of preconditioned language or cognitive structures that impose rigid categories in its reading.
Rico has described himself as an “ontologist with a heuristic methodology.” A visit to his studio—its scaffolding filled with rigorously organized objects and materials—makes it clear that the world is his archive. Through endless exploration and material experimentation, he pursues a relentless inquiry into what it means to be human.
Echoing Jane Bennett’s notion of “vibrant matter,” he engages with found objects not as passive materials but as agents of meaning. His assemblages grant both symbolic and physical agency to these objects: as materials that resonate with their own histories, cultural connotations and sensory immediacy, they become active participants in meaning-making, continuously provoking, arranging, binding and disrupting the systems they inhabit.
Rico admits that the past two years—2023 and 2024—have been incredibly intense. His work gained wider recognition after participating in the Biennale, particularly for its use of found objects, symbolic materials and sculptural equations. But what most people don’t see is the weight behind that visibility. “As a viewer, you only see the final result,” he notes. “What’s hidden is the personal cost: you sometimes have to destroy parts of yourself to express certain ideas. You have to lose your sense of mortality to create something that feels truly alive.”
At Perrotin, Rico pushes himself to discover new ways of working and engaging with materials, preventing and reactivating techniques and the lexicon that had started defining his practice. As he explains, this show represents a rigorous exercise in resemanticizing his lexicon, reconfiguring familiar elements into something new. The materials and techniques may be the same, but he pushes them further, following the relentless flow of matter and energy that governs the physical and intellectual world.
After his cosmos-inspired beadworks created in collaboration with Indigenous communities, Rico now turns with a completely different meaning and aesthetic to the same traditional embroidery technique known as nierika, pressing beads into canvas to cover undulating surfaces enclosed within rectangular wooden frames. As if shifting from the macrocosmic to the microscopic, these wall-mounted bas-reliefs evoke the texture of human skin through their coloration, while their gentle undulations suggest the constant motion of the particles and molecules that compose it.
These works began with digital modeling; he used computer software to design the forms and simulate the fluid dynamics of liquid matter. Yet the color palette of the beads is grounded in something deeply biological—the tone of pigskin. “It’s the kind of pig we eat, the one used for sausages,” he notes. “Their skin has that specific pink tone; interestingly, pigs are among the animals biologically closest to humans.” Rico developed the bead color himself, layering yellows, oranges and multiple shades of pink. “Just like human skin, it’s never a single tone. There’s complexity. There are layers.” These nuances, he adds, often require scientific tools to truly perceive, and recent technology has revealed that human skin is composed of countless yellow variations.
Rico titled this series Fat Geometry: each textile surface evokes the tactility of skin as a container, exposing the shared illusion beneath notions of individuality and exceptionalism. This shift in perception is central to his practice. “Technology gives us the ability to transmute information into different material forms. In my work, that means transforming a digital waveform into a canvas, and then into a 3D sculpture,” he explains, underscoring his continued investigation into the fundamental structure of human existence.
Notably, even the nierika technique—initially developed by the Huichol community to translate visions into ritual objects—is repurposed here to draw attention to the very flesh of reality. As Rico continues to explore multiple scales—micro and macro, as in previous exhibitions—he engages even more deeply with the pixel scale, where reality is translated into code, into systems of data and numbers. He acknowledges that his entire practice is a sustained attempt to capture the fabric of reality and examine how we translate it through human-made systems of meaning.
Yet the sausages punctuating the show pull us back to the physical—fleshy, vulnerable and exposed—reminding us of our condition of captivity within constructed architectures. Suspended from the ceiling by chains, a single sausage suggests how we can become trapped within human-made structures or subjected to various forms of social confinement.
Rico admits that many collectors have interpreted these works through a sexual lens. “But that’s never my intention,” he says. “It’s more about sensuality—something subtler, more tactile and intimate.” These forms speak to the vulnerability embedded in our relationships with other bodies and with other humans. Their illusory, fleshy, almost healthy rosy presence starkly contrasts with the entropic forces of creation and decay, which operate far beyond any human illusion of rationality or permanence.
In relation to this kind of reflection on the caducity and ephemerality of our physical presence in the world, one of the absolute standout pieces in the show is Nearness, a large sculpture entirely made of glass, depicting two skeletal figures suspended from the ceiling, eternalized in a precarious embrace. Both are covered in glass sausages that oddly function as junctures, connecting and supporting the bodies in a fragile equilibrium. The sculpture, Rico explains, symbolizes a love that sustains both body and spirit because, often, the reality of our single body is not enough to truly give meaning to an encounter between two individuals.
At the same time, in this new show, many of Rico’s works remain animated by a more universal fundamental dialectic between anthropological intervention and the laws of nature, between rationality and the seemingly less logical order of the cosmos. Although Rico’s work appears, in many ways, to be deeply transient, it consistently poetically gestures toward a deeper meaning of existence that recognizes our condition as vulnerable and fragile yet inherently complex, emotional and intelligent, always confronting what it means to be part of a broader entanglement.
Even the act of tracing, identifying and exercising a kind of universal mathematics of things is, for Rico, a profoundly human attempt to accept that living within geometric and mathematical frames may be the only way we can exist—not simply because they are human-made, but because they so often echo patterns and structures belonging to the very order of the cosmos.
An attempt to visualize and measure this dialectic tension between order and disorder is represented in Made to the Measure of the World (The Stick is the Surest Peacemaker) I and II, where Rico lays out a diagram that seeks to translate the connections between organic and inorganic elements through a selection of their simulacra, combined in a logical-seeming yet deeply cryptic equation. The potential of objects to act as signifiers of the entire history of civilization is tested here while reflecting on the enduring tension between the manufactured and the natural.
Fluid, generative structures of meaning are already embodied by trees—with their irregular, organic growth, branching and multiplying in illogical ways, following only the essential principles of nature and entropy. Rico has long been fascinated by trees—their branches, sticks and structural forms. He studies their architecture, the angles between branches, the way they grow and yield to gravity. For the exhibition, he featured some citrus trees in his wood-mounted nierika yarn embroideries, a plant he finds compelling for its global dispersion—like humans, they’ve spread across the planet, shaped by climate change and cross-pollination.
Yet this choice of subject in his Decorative Permutations I and II was also an attempt to avoid direct reference to scientific concepts in this investigation on the tension between structure and gravity. “If I stay too close to the metaphor of the apple falling from the tree, it becomes too literal, too Newtonian,” he says. “I no longer want my work to be directly associated with scientific concepts like the theory of relativity. It’s not about illustrating how the world functions in a purely scientific way. It’s more playful than that.” That’s where Rico’s irony comes in—that’s the role it plays. Irony gives him distance.
Still, Rico confirms that he is most interested in studying the relationship between geometry and the human body. But in his view, geometry doesn’t have to involve polyhedrons, icosahedrons or anything overly complex. “It’s about how we perceive things like frames,” he explains. “A square can be a reduction of something, a way of simplifying the universe, but also a window, a way to look deeper into the very structure of things.”
For Rico, geometry and mathematics are neither fixed paths nor restrictions but rather suggestions or possibilities. Geometry can also become a tool for sharing alternative, more open-ended forms of knowledge, as suggested by the oddly entangled symbols and branches in the “tree diagram” of The Open Sets (The Demand for Organic Unity of Structure in the Language). In fact, what fascinates Rico more is topology, the study of relationships between bodies and spaces. In this sense, topology becomes a way to understand the body’s shape—not in a medical or anatomical sense, but more like how ordinary people speak to one another, trying to define presence or position in space, using bones as an excuse or a reference point.
It’s also for this reason that Rico ventures into uncharted, unstable territories of disrupted perception and suspended disbelief, transforming the gallery into what Michel Serres might describe as a parasite—a space that interrupts yet sustains existing systems of knowledge. His absurd, sensual objects and logical-seeming equations destabilize the customary split between mind and body, intellect and sensation, emphasizing instead the inherently mingled nature of understanding.
Rico is convinced that, in the end, the human body is the only unit of measure we have to orient ourselves and make sense of the world. “To be honest, we don’t really have another option,” he admits. “I use my human body as a pretext or, rather, as a channel. It’s the most direct and precise way I have to begin asking questions. These are simple questions, perhaps, but ones that go very deep into our humanity,” he says, clarifying that, when he says our, it’s because he feels part of a shared race, a collective experience. “I have to return to my own experience as a human being and try to explore everything from that perspective.”
Ultimately, Rico’s work stems from the conviction that the human perspective—not necessarily anthropocentric, but grounded in our bodily, sensory and intellectual capacities—is the only one we have to orient ourselves in the world. His reflections echo Merleau-Ponty’s notion of embodied experience. “The body is our general medium for having a world,” wrote the French philosopher.
It’s us, pointing a finger at the Moon, trying to grasp cosmic phenomena from where we stand. So it makes more sense to focus on that limited scale and embrace our constraints to truly understand how things function in this universe, especially how deeply reality is tied to the construction of geometric forms. “It’s fascinating how easily we project ourselves onto those shapes,” he reflects. “In that sense, I think these structures—architectural, mathematical, cognitive, linguistic—are traps. But beautiful ones.”
Rico’s work reflects the human condition in its rawest and most authentic form: humans made of caducous, fallible flesh and fallible sensory hints, subject to larger forces and compelled to confront an irreducible chaos that demands solutions for survival. Yet disorder and noise can also be liberating—a rupture from rigid predictions and inherited understanding. Rico instead invites us to see the unexpected with new eyes, to connect micro and macro scales intuitively and to break free from the constraints of anthropological logic and scientific determinism. His work becomes instead an invitation to inhabit what might be called the poetic geometry of embodied existence, where intuition, flesh, system and entropy are in constant flux, continuously reconfiguring meaning as we experience it.
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