WHAT REMAINS WHEN
THE SYMBOLS HAVE FALLEN?
In dialogue with Gabriel O’Shea
FVTVRIST Magazine // Interview by Elina P.
16 September 2026
Gabriel O'Shea names his exhibitions after musical forms. Preludio in 2023, Obertura in 2025, and now Threni, borrowed from Stravinsky, and behind Stravinsky from the Lamentations of Jeremiah. He says he never planned them as chapters of a single work, but after a while he noticed they were speaking to one another.
Threni was his first museum exhibition, held at the Museo de la Ciudad de Querétaro, a building that has been a convent, a prison, and a museum in that order. He installed one work using original beams from the former convent, and hung a painting where nuns had once listened to the mass through an opening in the wall. Several rooms were left almost empty. Torsos were placed on the floor rather than raised, reversing the hierarchy of devotional display.
The work is made of wax, concrete, steel, latex, oil. It deals with crucifixions, wounds, chains, bodies that are never quite identifiable. What holds it together is not a subject so much as a condition: the sense that something has already been damaged, and that life is continuing as though it hadn't.
Fvtvrist met Gabriel O'Shea shortly after the exhibition came down.
Gabriel O'Shea, artist studio
Courtesy of the artist
Congratulations on your first first museum exhibition! Threni is the Latin title of the Lamentations of Jeremiah. What made lament the subject, and why now?
Classical music has been present in the titles of my most complete solo shows in recent years. My first exhibition was PRELUDIO (2023), then OBERTURA (2025), and for this one (my first museum show) I wanted to reclaim the title of one of my favorite musical works, Threni by Stravinsky. But also because the museum and the selection of pieces revolved around a certain religious iconography that felt in perfect alignment with that musical work, and for me it was as if I could finally make my first complete and formal "musical piece."
I don't think I chose lament because I wanted to make work about sadness. I was interested in what remains after something has already been lost, a body, an image, a belief, a place. Lament is strange because it doesn't repair anything. It simply refuses to let the absence disappear. Perhaps I only became able to recognize that much of the work I had already been making was a form of lament.
THRENI contains explicitly religious iconography. A crucifixion is the most reproduced image in Western art, which means it arrives heavy loaded with meaning. How do you approach a form that carries that much weight and that much repetition?
Growing up in Mexico, Catholic iconography was never something distant or exceptional. It was everywhere: in churches, homes, schools, streets, shops, on bodies, in small devotional images and objects. Saints and crucifixes become part of the visual environment almost before you are able to understand what they depict.
I don't try to empty the crucifixion of its history. That would be impossible. I'm interested in the opposite: an image that has accumulated so much meaning, and has been repeated so relentlessly, that it almost collapses under the weight of its own reproduction.
There is something violent in that repetition. I sometimes think about it in relation to contemporary technological systems and algorithms, where the same images, gestures and desires are presented to us over and over again until they become strangely neutral. The crucifixion has undergone a similar process over centuries. It is an image of torture and execution, yet it can appear on a necklace, above a bed, in a restaurant, in a school, or in someone's home without necessarily producing any conscious reaction.
That contradiction interests me: the image has not lost its violence, but our perception of it may have grown numb through familiarity. In the work, I try to create conditions in which that familiarity becomes unstable again, so the image can recover some of its physical, psychological and historical weight.
I AM LESS INTERESTED IN CATASTROPHE AS AN EVENT THAN IN THE MOMENT WHEN CATASTROPHE BECOMES ATMOSPHERE.
THRENI, Museo de la Ciudad de Querétaro, exhibition view
Courtesy of the artist
The Museo de la Ciudad is a former convent and prison, the building where Maximilian was held before his execution. How much did that history enter the show, and did you work with the rooms or against them?
Showing crucifixions inside a former convent puts the work back into the building's original function. Was that a confrontation, or something closer to restitution?
The rooms already carried a lot of information. From the first time I visited the museum, I was captivated by the space. I immediately felt that some of the works needed to exist there, not simply because of the history of the building, but because the architecture seemed capable of absorbing them.
I was more interested in allowing the work to become contaminated by the space, by its scale, its darkness, the old beams, the traces of previous uses. The building never felt neutral to me. It already had a certain psychological and almost devotional weight.
During the process of developing the exhibition, I learned much more about the history of the museum, and some of those discoveries entered the show quite literally. One of the most important works was installed using original wooden beams from the former convent. Another large painting, whose title comes from a symphonic work, was placed where there had once been an opening through which the nuns could listen to the music of the mass. I liked that these connections were present, but not necessarily explained. They could remain embedded in the installation almost like residues.
We were also very careful not to overload the rooms. Some of them were left almost empty, with only four or five works, so that they retained something of the austerity of a convent cell. I wanted the silence of the architecture to remain visible.
I was interested in placing bodies and torsos low, sometimes directly on the floor, rather than elevating them as devotional images traditionally would be. There is something important to me in reversing that hierarchy.
The building has already been a convent, a prison, a museum; the images have already passed through centuries of reproduction and transformation. What interested me was allowing those different histories to occupy the same space for a moment, without trying to reconcile them.
1/ The silence was accurate, 2026. Courtesy of the artist
2/ The error was minor, 2026. Courtesy of the artist
Lamentations mourns a destroyed city and a broken covenant. Given the venue, and given where the work is made, was the lament in THRENI directed at something specific?
I don't think the lament in THRENI was directed at one specific event. I was more interested in a condition — the feeling that something has already been damaged, and yet life continues as if it were normal. Repetition can make even the most extreme things feel ordinary. I am less interested in catastrophe as an event than in the moment when catastrophe becomes atmosphere.
The fact that the work was made in Mexico, and later placed inside a building with such a complicated history, inevitably entered the exhibition. But I never wanted THRENI to become documentary, or to point toward one specific political or historical loss. I am more interested in what those conditions leave behind: in bodies, in materials, in images, in belief.
Perhaps the lament was directed at the erosion of certain forms of meaning, while recognizing that we are still unable to completely abandon them. Mourning begins, for me, when something no longer functions as it once did, but refuses to disappear.
THRENI, Museo de la Ciudad de Querétaro, exhibition view
Courtesy of the artist
The show has just closed and you've been deinstalling. What is that like for you, is a work finished when it comes down, or does something happen to it in that process?
Deinstallation is strange because everything that felt fixed for months suddenly becomes temporary again. During installation, every decision is moving toward a specific image or atmosphere. During deinstallation, that structure disappears very quickly and the works return to being objects: paintings become canvases that are wrapped and carried, sculptures become weight, concrete, steel, wax.
I don't think the work itself necessarily ends when it comes down, but the exhibition does. And that distinction is important to me. A show only exists for a very specific period of time, through the relationships between the works, the architecture, the light, the distance between objects, even the way someone moves through the rooms.
There is something almost violent in seeing all of that disappear in a few hours. But I also like it. It reminds me that an exhibition is not a permanent state of the work. It is one temporary arrangement of it.
Decay runs through the work as a constant, but it operates differently in different pieces: the wax fragments are decayed objects, while Non-Indexed is about a body being destroyed in real time. There's a long philosophical tradition that treats ruin as a form of knowledge, Benjamin's argument that allegory finds its truth in decay (The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin contrasts allegory with the romanticized ideal of the symbol. While a symbol claims to offer a timeless, harmonious unity between meaning and physical form, allegory strips objects of their eternal facade) or the vanitas painters who used rot to make time visible. What is your relationship to decay?
I am fascinated by decay because it reminds us of mortality, but I don't really think of decay as destruction. I think of it as a continuation.
We tend to understand an object through the moment in which it appears complete, as if that were its true state and everything that follows were a deterioration of it. I'm not sure I believe in that distinction. A material is already changing from the moment it takes form. My wax changes color over years, metal oxidizes, organic matter decomposes, concrete cracks. What we call decay may simply be the moment when those processes become visible.
Change is always more difficult to accept. Decay makes that fiction harder to maintain.
It is also one of the reasons I return so often to Béla Tarr. In his films, time is not simply something through which a story moves. You almost feel it accumulating on bodies, buildings, landscapes, weather. Nothing needs to collapse dramatically; duration itself is enough to alter everything. I think I am interested in something similar materially.
I also don't just romanticize the ruin. A ruin can become beautiful very easily, and then decay becomes another aesthetic surface. What interests me is the point before that comfort, when an object is still recognizable, but has begun to become something else.
Maybe decay is a form of knowledge because it reveals that the object was never as stable as we believed it to be. It carries evidence of what has happened to it, but also of what is still happening. In that sense, decay is not the image of death for me. It is the visibility of time.
THRENI, Museo de la Ciudad de Querétaro, exhibition view
Courtesy of the artist
The torso recurs in your work. In art history, the fragmented antique torso was elevated precisely because it was incomplete. What does that inheritance give you, and what do you have to argue with in it?
Historically, the fragmented antique torso could be elevated precisely because its absence allowed an ideal body to be imagined around it. I am interested in almost the opposite condition. My torsos are not fragments waiting to be restored. They are remains, sometimes the remains of a body, but also of a belief, an image, or a system of meaning that no longer occupies the position it once did.
This is why I often place them directly on the floor. Religious bodies were traditionally elevated: above the altar, on the wall, suspended over the viewer. Bringing the torso down changes that hierarchy. What was once suspended above us returns to the floor, to gravity, to matter.
There is also, inevitably, another reading for me. I make these works in Mexico, where the image of the fragmented body cannot be completely separated from the violence that surrounds us. I don't want the sculptures to become representations of specific victims or events, but I also don't think I can pretend that context is absent. An incomplete body here carries a different kind of weight.
Most of these torsos still carry the wound in Christ's side. For me, that wound makes them more than anonymous classical fragments; it is the trace of a very specific image that has survived for centuries. But the wound changes from piece to piece. In some works it is made with minerals, quartz or precious matter, almost as if the injury had become a relic. In another, the wound is made from flies. I like that the same opening can move between devotion and decomposition.
Some of the bodies are also attached to heavy metal chains. The chains make that weight literal. Even when the symbols have fallen, we continue to drag them. They remain embedded in language, morality, architecture, images, even in people who no longer consider themselves religious.
Perhaps what interests me is the moment when an old god is no longer completely able to console us, but we have not yet learned how to live without it. I sometimes wonder whether we are simply replacing one system of belief with another — technology, images, systems we don't completely understand — while still carrying the weight of the previous ones.
So the torso, for me, is not really about incompleteness as beauty. It is about what remains when a body, a belief, or a system can no longer remain whole.
EVEN WHEN THE SYMBOLS HAVE FALLEN, WE CONTINUE TO DRAG THEM.
Gabriel O'Shea, artist studio
Courtesy of the artist
In Preludio, wax sculptures were shown in glass cases, reading as museum artefacts. Why wax rather than marble or bronze?
Wax interested me precisely because it refuses the permanence that marble or bronze seem to promise.
It behaves much more like a body. It responds to temperature, it can soften, scratch, deform, collect dust and retain fingerprints. Even when it appears still, it never feels completely stable; there is always the possibility that the form could change. I also love working with an organic material that continues to mutate over time. I build the sculptures layer by layer, so the process is, in some ways, very close to painting with glazes — slowly accumulating translucent layers, almost in the way some of the old masters constructed depth in painting. In person, that process gives the sculptures a much stronger sense of physical presence, almost something bodily. For these works, marble or bronze would never have produced the same effect. They tend to suggest permanence, monumentality and a certain cleanliness, whereas I am much more interested in instability, vulnerability and the possibility of transformation. That contrast is important to me. The sculptures themselves can feel heavy or even violent, but the material they are made from is extremely delicate and, at the same time, very beautiful.
Wax also carries a strong religious association for me. Growing up surrounded by Catholic imagery, candles were always present — the smoke, the smell, the act of lighting a candle for someone, the prayers attached to it, the wax slowly disappearing as the ritual takes place. So the material already contains a relationship to devotion, duration and disappearance.
The smoked-glass cases in Preludio gave the sculptures the appearance of preserved museum artefacts, almost as if they had survived from another time, but the material inside them was inherently unstable. I liked that contradiction.
Wax, for me, keeps the body vulnerable.
Gabriel O'Shea, artist studio
Courtesy of the artist
There's a very particular charge in the earlier work: the violence is explicit, but the surfaces are glossy, taut, almost seductive - latex, wax, high finish. The result sits close to eroticism. Was that tension constructed deliberately, or did it come from the materials themselves? What aura were you after?
I think it began with the materials, but once I recognized that tension, I started constructing it very deliberately. I have always been interested in materials that complicate what they contain. Wax can make a damaged body appear beautiful; latex can feel protective and suffocating at the same time; a polished surface can make something violent strangely desirable. I like that contradiction. I don't think attraction and violence necessarily cancel each other out, sometimes they intensify one another.
In the newer paintings, that tension has become more explicitly erotic, but perhaps less through sexuality itself than through what is hidden. Bodies are covered, restrained, turned away, partially visible. There are straps, translucent surfaces, high heels, gestures that could suggest submission or care, but the action is never completely explained. I think desire often needs an obstruction. The less information the image gives you, the more you begin to project onto it. This is also why the act of looking has become increasingly important in the recent work. The viewer is placed in a slightly uncomfortable position: you are allowed to see something intimate, but you are never told exactly what you are witnessing. There is a certain complicity in continuing to look.
In that sense, I don't see the more erotic work as completely separated from the religious work. Religious imagery has become less explicit, but some of its structures remain: ritual, exposure, submission, restraint, reverence, the body offered to be looked at. Devotion and eroticism can share a surprisingly similar vocabulary.
What I was after was something between intimacy and evidence, attraction and unease. I wanted the image to seduce before it explained itself — if it ever explained itself at all…
Preludio, Obertura, Requiem, Threni, everything is named after a musical or liturgical form. Is that one long composition, or does each title arrive separately?
I never planned them as chapters of a single work. Each title arrived separately, usually when the exhibition had already begun to develop its own atmosphere. But after a while, I realized they were speaking to one another.
I am very attracted to musical and liturgical forms because they already contain an idea of time. A prelude anticipates something, an overture opens, a requiem mourns, a threnos laments. Even before hearing anything, the title already suggests that there is something before it and something that will come after.
I love thinking about an exhibition almost as if I were composing music: through repetition, intervals, silence, density, changes of scale, and the amount of time a work asks from you.
Music has probably influenced the way I understand exhibitions more deeply than I initially realized. In music, silence is not the absence of composition; it is part of the composition. I think the same can happen in an exhibition.
So I wouldn't call it one continuous narrative, because I don't know where it is going, and I don't want to know in advance. But perhaps they belong to the same composition in another sense. They belong to the same language., even if I still don't know what the next movement will be.
You entered art university in Mexico City and left after a few months, then went to the Barcelona Academy of Art for classical drawing. What were you looking for?
When I entered art university in Mexico City, I realized quite quickly that what I was actually looking for was much more specific. I already had images and ideas in my head, but I didn't yet have the technical ability to translate them into a painting or a drawing in the way I wanted.
I can be quite obsessive, so I didn't want the lack of technique to determine what I was able to make. I decided to leave and go somewhere where I could concentrate almost entirely on learning how to draw anatomy, proportion, light, form… At the Barcelona Academy of Art, I became very aware of the discipline behind a convincing image, and of the hundreds of hours of repetition and practice that it requires.
I had things I wanted to say, but I needed to understand the mechanics well enough that technique would no longer be the obstacle between the idea and the work.
But technical training is also a double-edged sword. Once you have spent so much time learning what is supposedly correct, it becomes very difficult not to see every deviation as a mistake. Sometimes I envy the freedom of someone who never learned those rules in the first place. Painting loosely can actually be much harder for me than painting carefully, because part of my mind is constantly identifying everything that is “wrong.”
So, strangely, part of my practice now involves unlearning some of what I worked so hard to learn. The technique gave me control, but I am increasingly interested in knowing when to lose it.
Your figures are almost never identifiable. They appear from behind, as fragments, or veiled. Anonymity seems to be a structural condition of the work. Why this choice of representation?
The moment a figure becomes identifiable, the image begins to organize itself around a person or a biography. I am usually interested in stopping just before that happens. Turning a body away, covering it, fragmenting it, or withholding the face allows the figure to remain unresolved for longer.
I think this has become even more important to me recently because the face has acquired a very different function in contemporary life. It is no longer only the place where we recognize another person; it has become information. Faces are photographed, scanned, classified, stored, reproduced, transformed into profiles and interpreted by algorithms.
So anonymity can become a kind of resistance to that certainty.
They remain very particular bodies, but bodies whose identity cannot be completely consumed by the image.
This is also connected to my fascination with the uncanny and, more recently, with AI-generated and technologically mediated imagery. I am very interested in images that look convincing before something begins to feel slightly wrong — where the body is familiar, but its situation is not; where you cannot completely determine whether what you are seeing is documentation, construction, memory or fabrication. I like using very traditional painting techniques to slow those images down. Something generated or encountered through contemporary media can take seconds to appear on a screen, and then I may spend weeks painting it through a very old and almost obsessive process.
The translucent plastics, restraints and BDSM references in some of the recent paintings work the same way, they reveal and conceal at the same time. If everything is visible and explained, a certain tension disappears. Mystery requires missing information.
The figures can appear intimate without ever becoming known. Perhaps anonymity allows the image to keep something for itself.
%202026%20(4x3)%20copia.jpg)
Reverence, 2026
Courtesy of the artist
You've said you don't believe in the term self-taught, that your best teachers are the artists you research. Who have you been reading lately?
I have never felt very comfortable with the term self-taught. We are constantly looking, absorbing, comparing, borrowing, rejecting. Sometimes standing in front of a painting in a museum can teach you more than someone explaining it to you. You begin to understand why an artist placed something where they did, how an edge was treated, how light was constructed, why one decision works and another doesn't.
I think of myself almost as a container that is constantly accumulating information. The artists I research most obsessively have probably been my real teachers, even though I have never met most of them. But I don't think a teacher necessarily has to be an artist either. Sometimes it can be a film, a book, or something completely ordinary in the street. I can become fascinated by the way a metal grate is constructed in the pavement, by the proportions of an industrial object, or by the way a material has aged. If you are paying enough attention, almost anything can teach you something.
I also don't really separate these sources very much. Looking at a painting, watching a film, listening to noise or classical music, studying how someone constructed a garment — all of them eventually become part of the visual and conceptual vocabulary I work from.
Maybe that is why I resist the idea of being self-taught. I have had too many teachers — so many that reducing them to a short list would feel almost arbitrary.
THRENI, Museo de la Ciudad de Querétaro, exhibition view
Courtesy of the artist
What are you working on now? What would you like to work on?
Right now I am mostly in the studio, painting. The new work continues some of the concerns that appeared in the Miami exhibition, especially the uncanny, images that feel seductive or familiar, but never completely accessible.
I am also thinking a lot about the way we experience images now: the amount we consume, the lack of context, and the anxiety that comes with constant exposure. Restriction, concealment, desire and control are becoming more present in the paintings.
I usually don't share much while I am working. I prefer to wait until there is a body of work that feels ready to exist publicly. I enjoy that private period, when the work can still change without having to explain itself.
I don't have an immediate exhibition ahead, which I am enjoying. I would like to stay in the studio long enough for the work to become something I didn't entirely anticipate.
FIN
Gabriel O'Shea (1998, Mexico)
Lives and works in Mexico.
Multidisciplinary artist who works with painting, sculpture, photography, installation music and video. Memory, violence, technology, bodies and decay are some of the constant themes in Gabriel's work, his dreamlike images balance in a space between the peaceful and the violent, between figurative and conceptual.
Gabriel O'Shea, courtesy of the artist
_edited.jpg)
