Robert Gabris uses pencils, scissors and paper with the surgical precision of an operation, even an autopsy. The artist works alone, patiently cutting and dissecting his surfaces, incision by incision, to determine what lies beneath (and perhaps even piece it together).
Although rooted in drawings referencing 19th-century lexicons of comparative anatomy, Gabris’ work tends to be socially engaged and community-building oriented. For the “Bodyshop” exhibition, the artist creates lively morphologies in works on paper and cardboard, giving birth to a fragile and meticulously crafted menagerie. In body composition, 2022, six of these creatures – complex hybrids of insects and mice, with long tails and glittering tentacles – appear to have sprouted from what appear to be human bones. Their almost eerie morbidity is juxtaposed with the colorful joy of the larger “Organs” series, 2023, which depicts twenty-four imaginary organs assembled from interlocking silhouettes of entrails, human and animal. The parts taken from Gabris come to life by themselves, but they also leave in their wake the evocation of a “body without organs” (a term that Deleuze and Guattari borrowed from the French playwright and poet Antonin Artaud): a body uncontrolled potential, freed from the organizational structures imposed by its components.
“Bodyshop” offers an ambitious systematization of the self: a haunting and obsessive search for exact proportion and symmetry with strict rules, oscillating between order and disorder, the norm and its deviations, but always in a world that is neither given nor immutable. Instead, it’s up to us to choose and define for ourselves.
