Roberto Gomez presses the Mexica funerary obsidian sphere under his tongue. Flesh on bone fingers fashion a pledge to handle with fragile and humorous care the story of death. However, this action is not for an ancient burial rite. Handling ceramic elements spat from a volcano is for life. Gomez exhumes an iconography buried in cracks between cultures and his personal narrative with index finger, thumb and ring, little and long, pushing and pulling expressions that ipso facto declare clay is not inert, or dead, but responds, aches, and writhes to meet the hunger of his creative mind and artistic soul. Exaggerated tongues of flesh leap through rings of fire and escape between swollen lips that grin and grind on earth that’s now glass. Quartz inversion is the physics of complex human experience.
The red nose is nothing to fear. The clown only terrifies us because it wears what Christopher Bayes, professor and head of physical acting at the Yale School of Drama, calls the smallest mask in the world.[1] And yet, unlike other masks, this red one uncovers because the smallness of the nose works like a magnifying glass or a bull's-eye. Equally microscopic are the loosely fitting Fruit of the Loom gotch gurneys for flesh and scrotum that Gomez does dress as the santo loco, or holy fool. Here, the enigmatic Gomez doesn’t fool around. The focus is all about the balls.
