Proyecto H is pleased to present Like Finding a Needle in a Nest of Snakes, a solo exhibition by Pablo de Laborde Lascaris opening on 4 September 2025. This new series of sculptural works coils around the invisible: the threats we carry, the forgotten tenderness, and the voids that pulse with memory. With a practice centred on process and material experimentation, de Laborde Lascaris follows the sensibility of artists such as Richard Deacon and Claes Oldenburg, embracing contradiction, scale, and the poetic transformation of industrial and domestic forms.

At the centre of the exhibition is Crictor, a monumental, modular aluminium serpent crowned with a bronze needle. The work takes its name and point of departure from Crictor, a children’s book by French author Tomi Ungerer, which the artist reads to his son. At once affectionate and unsettling, the sculpture plays with dualities: it is unclear whether the snake is coiling inward to devour or protect something at its core, or extending outward to release what was once hidden between its folds. The bronze needle, delicately poised atop its body, becomes both surgical tool and domestic instrument. It sews and pierces. The quiet drama of its scale recalls Oldenburg’s magnified objects, while the phrase “a needle in a haystack” hovers nearby—something sharp, necessary and unresolved.

The exhibition continues this fascination with serpents, not as zoological creatures, but as metaphors for what crawls in silence: anxiety, the unsaid, the unpredictable. Cast in aluminium using sand moulds, these headless and tailless forms evoke the phrase “a snake in the grass”, a threat always lurking beneath still surfaces. Their curves speak of unease, of internal knots that activate when language fails.

Slough, composed of white canvas segments stacked into a soft, disordered heap, offers a more fragile counterpart. Modular in nature, each piece echoes the body of a snake, and together they form a pile with no fixed order—part anatomy, part ruin. There is no clear beginning or end, only weight and repetition. Stillness becomes its own kind of tension.

Two mosaic works deepen the exploration of the snake’s body and memory. Tullido, the first, is composed of embossed aluminium sheet. The image of the serpent is processed directly into the metal—pressed, cut, exposed. Its skin becomes a site of violence. Sewing needles pierce the surface like arrows, evoking Saint Sebastian, turning the snake into a wounded body, stilled yet resisting collapse. The aluminium is not polished, but marked. The serpent is not sleeping, but stunned. It remains—cut, punctured, and open.

In contrast, Sutura, the second mosaic, is entirely covered in graphite. Eight beeswax panels, soft and pale beneath the surface, hold the serpent’s form in positive relief, as though the image has risen like a scar. Here, graphite acts as a fossilising agent, sealing the body into something ancient and distant. The work speaks of scarring after battle. What remains is not simply an impression, but a memory locked in blackened wax, absorbing light and giving back only the faint glint of reflection.

Both mosaics act as reflective reflections. One captures light to show what shifts. The other buries it, preserving what resists.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, Nido III and Nido V appear as sculptural pauses. These wax-carved voids reference both nests and absences. Fragile hollows, they seem to contain the trace of what once was, or what may yet arrive. They rest somewhere between cradle and grave, between care and disappearance. Here, the void is not absence, but presence condensed by memory.

Some of the works in Like Finding a Needle in a Nest of Snakes—such as Crictor and Slough—are modular and reconfigurable, allowing them to shift and adapt across time and space. Others remain fixed, carved or cast into permanence.

This interplay reflects the essence of de Laborde Lascaris’s practice, guided by process, where the act of casting, cutting, weaving or assembling is as important as the final form.

Like Finding a Needle in a Nest of Snakes is a meditation on the duality between softness and sharpness, the internal and the exposed. An invitation to traverse a sculptural terrain where mending and undoing are sibling gestures, and where the hidden becomes structure.