“Art is not created or destroyed, it is just transformed,” says the Mexican artist Gabriel de la Mora. He believes that objects retain the energy invested in their making, and so he works with discarded materials—butterfly wings, old radios, shoe soles, eggshells, doors, and daguerreotypes—assembling them into geometrically precise visions. In doing so, he seeks to make that energy—the object’s “aura”—visible. “People come to my studio expecting to smell oil paint and see easels,” he says. “But it’s completely different: it’s like a laboratory. I feel more of a connection to a scientist than to a painter.” This survey spans the last two decades of De la Mora’s practice. —Elena Clavarino