Tomás Díaz Cedeño – Breath below

RIBOT is pleased to present Breath below, the first exhibition at the gallery by Mexican artist Tomás Díaz Cedeño (Mexico City, 1983).

Terracotta, one of the chosen materials within Díaz Cedeño’s multidisciplinary practice, is central to several of the works on view, produced at the Studio Ernan Design kiln in Albisola during a residency made possible through a collaboration between RIBOT gallery and Museo della Ceramica in Savona.

The wall-based works belong to a cycle entitled Background / Foreground, consisting of glazed or natural clay bas-reliefs where fictional narratives unfold across juxtaposed tiles. The complex iconographic system—featuring animals, anatomical elements, and objects of worship—interweaves personal stories with popular or seemingly trivial symbols, essential in shaping a shared memory capable of defining communities and cultures.

In the artist’s practice, terracotta acquires a “conceptual” value: its very composition, formed from the minerals specific to a given area, embodies the essence of the landscape, understood as the site where identity is forged – a “key” theme that, from this perspective, becomes a series of overlapping or sedimented layers.
The material—evoking a form of primal creativity that seamlessly transcends generations and time—thus sheds its archaic connotation and takes on a contemporary vitality, an unprecedented energy that, as the title suggests, resembles a breath.

Also on view are two bronze sculptures that highlight further directions in Díaz Cedeño’s research. These installations are cast from fragile and ephemeral objects such as polystyrene cups bearing the imprints of teeth, or playing cards. Once again, elements that are trivial and seemingly insignificant relinquish their function to become something else. The use of bronze introduces an ironic undertone, subverting classical conventions, prompting new reflections, and questioning how objects and symbols are reconfigured over time.

For Breath below, the artist has also created a special project of eight exemplars. The bronze, this time gilded, immortalizes sets of teeth -“ideal bites” which appear as glittering, uncanny anatomical jewel-sculptures.