No Title
BYRON GAGO
Bodies Farming · 2019
No Title is a thin cast sheet, barely a centimetre deep, made by pouring epoxy resin and vegetable oils into an arch-shaped frame set over a bas-relief, so the surface takes on the wrinkles and veins of an organic skin. The fragile sheet is then hung from stainless-steel cables and clips, marked and consumed in suspension, a surface that looks like aged skin approaching its own deterioration. The arch, one of the oldest archetypes of Western architecture, frames a meeting of two registers: built form and living matter, structure and the body.
The arch is the form that carries weight. It distributes load through compression: the engineering that let the Romans, the Mesopotamians, the Persians span an opening in a stone wall without a lintel. It is architectural confidence made visible. No Title casts that load-bearing form into a thin, fragile sheet of resin and oil and then hangs it from cables, and in doing so inverts it: the arch is no longer carrying weight, it is being carried. The form whose entire function was to support is now itself supported. Strength through compression becomes fragility under suspension: the figure of architectural confidence, deliberately and visibly broken.
The withheld title is part of the same argument. The work refuses a verbal name because its claim is that the surface is the title: the wrinkles, the veins, the thinness, the way it hangs. To give it a word would be to hand the viewer a key to press against the surface; leaving it untitled lets the surface name itself. The gesture risks reading as evasion, but it is closer to an insistence on the visible: a refusal to be paraphrased into language, a demand that the thing be looked at rather than read.
Suspension is the work's last and hardest decision. The sheet was cast lying flat in its frame on the floor; hung vertically, it is forced to carry its own weight against gravity. And a sheet this thin carries its weight badly, sagging, micro-tearing at the points where the clips hold it, working slowly toward a split. The vertical position is the position of maximum stress for the form: the work is asked to perform under conditions it cannot quite survive. To make it at all is a willingness to make the thing that does not stay.
"The phrase 'approaching its complete deterioration' suggests entropy and decline, yet the sheet's preservation in suspension means it is not actually deteriorating. The work captures a moment of decay through permanent preservation."
Critical review, 2026
It is not preserved. It is actively dying, just slowly enough to be missed. The vegetable oils that plasticise the sheet migrate to the surface and evaporate; the resin grows more brittle; the translucency increases week by week as the oils leave. The deterioration the work names is literal, not metaphorical, and the cables hold the sheet exactly where that loss is most visible. The exhibition is not the work's preservation; it is the work's observable death, measured in months, not years.
No Title
2019
Final work
- Cast sheet — resin, bio-oils, on arch frame
- Suspended by steel cables · 180 × 75 × 1 cm
01 / 04
The work is a cast of a surface, made to be read as one. A mix of epoxy resin and vegetable oils was poured, lying flat, into an arch-shaped frame set over a bas-relief; the relief pressed its wrinkles and veins into the curing sheet; once set, the thin result, a single centimetre deep, was lifted from the floor and hung vertically from steel cables and clips. Almost every decision is about thinness: how little material can hold an image of skin and still bear being hung.
The bas-relief was not an abstract organic pattern. It was taken from a real body: the abdominal skin of a person in late middle age, carrying the wrinkles and veins that ageing leaves. The artist kept the identity unnamed out of a sense of privacy, and the unnaming let the surface read as generic; named or not, it remains the precise recording of one specific body, not a decorative texture. The sheet is a portrait pressed flat.
In the Bodies Farming series, the body and its substances are treated as something cultivated and recorded: farmed. No Title farms a surface: it lifts one body's ageing skin as a cast and re-casts it in materials that will themselves age and fail. Like Placenta the year before, it is a slab of unstable chemistry hung where its own slow loss can be watched. The work is not built to last; making it is the decision to make the thing that does not stay.
No Title
2019
Skin / process
- Process documentation
- Skin bas-relief cast · resin–oil sheet
01 / 02
