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Gabriel Macotela

La medida de las cosas

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With this exhibition, we approach the vision of one of the most important creators in the country, Gabriel Macotela (Zapopan, Jalisco, 1954): draftsman, painter, sculptor, cultural promoter, activist, conversationalist, thinker, friend—a universal humanist.

Belonging to a disruptive generation in the Mexican art scene of the 1970s, he studied at the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Printmaking “La Esmeralda” and at the National School of Visual Arts (ENAP) of the UNAM, where he met his life mentor, artist Gilberto Aceves Navarro. He was part of Grupo Suma (1976–1982), a collective of visual artists who took to the streets and their surroundings as a laboratory for creative experimentation.

In 1976, Macotela presented his first solo exhibition at Casa del Lago in Mexico City. A year later, together with artist Yani Pecanins, he founded the publishing imprint Cocina Ediciones, and in 1985 the bookstore El Archivero. Both projects were dedicated to the creation, dissemination, and promotion of alternative publications and were part of the artist’s book movement in Mexico.

In 1988, he presented the installation La Sonora Industrial at the Tamayo Museum, a set of musical sculptures. In the year 2000, he was one of the founders of the art and social project FARO Oriente, located on what was once a garbage dump in Iztapalapa. In 2006, he inaugurated a monumental sculpture that has become an emblem of Mexico City, installed on a chimney of the former Tolteca cement factory, closed in 1986. In 2014, he created the mural Razon de hombre y cuerpo humano ("Reason of Man and the Human Body"), which is now part of the muralist history of UNAM. In 2024, he received a tribute for 50 years of artistic career from INBAL at the Palacio de Bellas Artes.

This exhibition is composed of three paintings and a selection of nine works on paper by a creator of unfolding worlds, who represents the multiple dimensions of life and dreams.

Before artists of this magnitude, I always recall the image of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, a drawing that has become an authentic universal symbol, as it synthesizes many of the key ideas of humanist thought since the Renaissance: man—or rather, the human being—as the measure of all things.

I dare say that each image by Macotela, as with Leonardo, contains a formal exploration of the representation of the quadrature of the circle; that is, the representation of an expanded universe in concentric circles, in geometric forms, in a fortunate symbiosis of spiritual knowledge and a humanist sensibility.

We could think of Vitruvius as the great architect who dreamed of creating a spiritual architecture sustained by a model human being, a measure of the universe, capable of "encoding" and "decoding" existence. In this way, each work by Gabriel Macotela seeks to reinvent a spiritual human being as the measure of the world—this is the reality to which we aspire as a radically committed act to life, nature, and humanity.

-Demián Flores
La Cebada, Xochimilco, 2025