RITUALS OF EXTINCTION

 

There are artists who embark on a search for a way to cry out. For the manner and language in which their cry may find expression. And along the road, each step becomes a goal, a discovery, a work of art.

But before the work, what is imperative is the genuine need to cry out. A leap into the abyss, from pain to awareness, and which turns a leap into a gesture more expressive than any leap that extinguishes life, and turns a cry into a truth more radical and shattering than any cry. 

The many decades of the life journey embarked upon by Patricio Robles Gil have led us to dramatically increase our awareness of the diversity of life on the planet, and the ravaging to which it has been subjected. We have been moved and touched by his experiencing and regarding wildlife and the natural world in general as something beyond us, that transcends us. To experience the sighting of a jaguar, for example, as an apparition. To see and photograph through such eyes is a ritual.

Time and again, that ritual journey toward what is best in the world has encountered organized cruelty and the systematic destruction of diversity. And beyond the coins into which the destruction is converted, Patricio has looked deeply and has been able to discern the implacable cruelty of the human species, what is worst in the world. 

So then Patricio Robles Gil embarked on a parallel journey, in the peculiar jungle of world art, “sighting” a rich diversity of exceptional artistic languages; and in making them his, he learned to express in each of them his necessary cry, his devastation, his pain. Each one of his works is an expressive ritual, his variety is in itself a concert of rituals that now brings into focus and captures devastating rituals, the terrible rituals of extinction.

 

Alberto Ruy Sánchez