How do Baroque culture, biomineralization by oysters, and metabolic processes in the arts connect? This was the intriguing question underlying Cristóbal Gracia’s latest show, “Perlas barrocas cultivadas; el mundo es una ostra, que se abre con cuchillo” (Cultured Baroque Pearls; The World Is an Oyster, Which with Knife Will Open). The exhibition included an array of elaborate engravings, sculptures, and wall-mounted panels that assimilate disparate elements through a process of cultural digestion. Shells, mother-of-pearl, dust, scrap, plaster-cast reproductions of classical sculptures (inspired by those in Mexico City’s Academy of San Carlos), as well as baroque and pop culture elements were featured. These pieces evoke the biological processes involved in the gestation of pearls, as well as the historical processes that metabolize objects into luxury use or disuse, energy or waste.
On entering, viewers encountered a polyptych of four engravings incorporating heliography, an early photographic process, in which faces, feet, flowers, and other sculptural fragments are carefully delineated. Each intricate image is surrounded by what at a distance looks like a cloud of dust but on closer inspection reveals meticulous delineations of tires, skulls, and other objects. In one engraving, the dust takes on the shape of a baroque pearl, that is, an irregularly shaped pearl, a perfect imperfection born from the oyster’s defensive secretion of layers of nacre in response to an invader. This transformation is the result of a parasitic relationship in which, just as aesthetic canons are imposed on diverse cultures, a foreign object or irritant is gradually enveloped, digested, and reconfigured, to give rise ultimately to a new, hybrid identity.
Dramatically lit and lined with felt, the following rooms unfolded like a jewelry box, inviting you to discover the treasures within. Three human-scale sculptures took center stage, emerging from gleaming brass shells delicately positioned on black bases crafted to resemble the crates used in pearl farms. Like the engravings, these pieces have been progressively covered with objects and with dust to give them shapes resembling those of baroque pearls. Perla barroca cultivada, “La Pelusa” (Baroque Cultured Pearl, “The Dust Lint”) (all works cited, 2025) is an assemblage of plaster casts with plastic beads, toys, coins, Aztec-inspired souvenirs, and other detritus. A piece similarly titled but subtitled “La Adán” (The Adam) is composed of hundreds of discarded objects such as packaging materials and electronic components, and a few bits of plaster here and there, while a third such work, subtitled “La Absoluta” (Assoluta), is covered with junked merchandise. This was the largest harvested pearl in the show, embodying the intriguing paradox in which decay and creation converge.
On the adjacent walls were a series of chiaroscuro panels successfully combining two different techniques. El polvo es nácar (Dust Is Mother-of-Pearl) consists of four panels made in collaboration with Taller Orígenes, a group of Mexican artisans working with enconchado, that is, mother-of-pearl inlay on panel, a pictorial genre characteristic of Mexican Baroque. At the bottom of each panel is a layer of white plaster carved into intricate curves, while at the top, on a black background pigmented with pulverized sheep bone charcoal are tiny, shiny reproductions of the objects that compose the sculptures, all made of mother-of-pearl and coated by a beautifully imperfect layer of thicker bone powder.
Gracia’s work explores the intersection of nature and culture, where dust and plaster embody the discarded and the forgotten. Assemblages of secondhand objects critique the excesses of consumerism and mass production, while his Baroque aesthetic forges a hybrid identity that resists cultural monoliths. By merging past and present, profusion and waste, and denying the hierarchy of objects through the assimilation of conflictive narratives and aesthetics, Gracia’s art mimics consumerism’s insatiable appetite, which devours both art and oysters alike. The transformation of particles into pearls by oysters parallels the metabolic processes of art: Materials are digested and discarded but by the same token transformed into something new and valuable. With a baroque metabolic gaze, Gracia uncovers beauty in the imperfect, the abandoned, and the distorted, in a nuanced reflection on art, values, consumption, and neglect.
