The exhibition “Obsceno” was inaugurated at the Museum of Contemporary Art by what many consider “the painter of Buenos Aires.” His works, always in black and white, draw the shadows, silences and corners of the urban landscape.
The exhibition “Obsceno” by Pablo Siquier at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Buenos Aires (MACBA) exhibits a series of museum-quality paintings. The curator, Rodrigo Alonso, chose and obtained works that, for various reasons, mainly because they left the gallery to the buyers’ homes without any stop, are shown for the first time before the public.
For many art lovers, Siquier is the painter of Buenos Aires. His unmistakable black and white paintings draw the shadows, silences and corners of the cities. His Buenos Aires murals are located in places as diverse as the Art District of Puerto Madero, the Carlos Pellegrini subway station, the San Martín Cultural Center, the Güemes Sanatorium or the Calcio restaurant, in addition to numerous collectors’ houses.
The title “Obscene” finds its reason for being in the artist’s taste for uninhibitedly showing the remarkable beauty of these paintings and reveling in it. “Frontal, direct, exhibitionist”, Rodrigo Alonso describes them and does not hide the pleasure that contemplating them brings him. Meanwhile, he raises questions that lead us to think about the essence, the reason for being, of these works. “Powerful and silent, these forms occupy an absolute foreground, suspended over a clean, ascetic space. Despite its strong internal structure, its forcefulness and cohesion, it is difficult for us to understand its origin, purpose, logic or functionality. One of the fundamental axes of Siquier’s work is visuality itself in its conflictive relationships with representation and the gaze.”
The answer may lie in the determination to produce art for art’s sake, a purpose so closely related to the generation of the 90s, that of the artist himself.. With no other concern than “visuality itself” that the curator mentions, stylistic issues seem to be the purpose of the compositions. Indeed, the paintings dramatically show the tensions that cross megalopolises, the forces of urban enclaves that are sometimes incompatible with each other, such as the agitation of vibrant areas and the uncertain and risky calm of the periphery.
In the MACBA exhibition there are the “traces” of styles that Pablo Siquier explained clearly: “Architecture has always had a strong influence on my work, but also design, urbanism, modernism and the consequences of modernism. I am interested in all the formal repertoires of the styles, seeing how they become dirty and modified with the passage of time and with geographical displacements. Like art deco, other styles also become sick, one infects the other.”
In the mid-90s, some critics found a close relationship between Siquier’s work and Argentine concrete art, which carried a firm ideology. “Mixtures of style and hybridization deactivate ideologies,” Siquier maintained firmly. “But I always liked persuasive architecture that is at the service of ideology, like the fascist architecture of Albert Speer,” he clarified and, in this way, praised the undoubted talent of Hitler’s architect. “I am attracted to Boullée, who in the 18th century “He designed great projects that were never built due to their excessive size. I admire Salamone’s architecture, those monumental buildings he built in La Pampa,” he added.
These influences ended up generating tensions in his own designs and exacerbating the volumes created from the contrasts of light and shadow. Alonso notices that, depending on the volume, the shapes appear “highlighted” in some paintings, or “submerged” in other, flatter ones. In the presentation text, he quotes Inés Katzenstein, when she explains that she only paints the shadows. “The figures are not revealed except through that immaterial echo of their body which is the shadow.” Then, the curator explains a strange work: “he even painted it when he decided to abandon symmetry, an intention from which he later gave up.”
There are paintings with the whimsical shapes of the moldings, another, with the metallic shine of copper and, finally, an immense freehand drawing in charcoal copied from a digital design, like most of his works. Similar to the one presented by Marcelo Pacheco at the 26th San Pablo Biennial. “In his paintings there was something of pastiche, of simulation, of a model; there were appropriations, hybridizations, quotes and artifices. His entire vocabulary became comfortable, it had a reason for being in this time of staging and retro nostalgia,” he wrote then. Pacheco.
The drawing demonstrates the artist’s powerful pulse, but given the volatility of the materials, it is destined to disappear. Rodrigo Alonso recognizes in the work of Pablo Siquier “an aesthetic program executed in a fierce and compulsive way” and adds that obsession is “another of the traits attributed to the author and that also seems to qualify his production.” Meanwhile, the sensitive dynamism of the charcoal serves the artist to highlight the vertigo of the inexhaustible multiplicity of lines, one of the characteristics that mark his style.
Source: Ambito
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
