Pablo Atchugarry
Rooms I, II, III, IX.
This exhibition Journey through Matter tries to show the influence in the works of the encounter of different materiales, where finally nature through matter becomes the main figure.
“Toda obra de arte seria nos cuenta la génesis de su propia creación”.
Roman Jacobson
“Every serious artwork tells us the genesis of its own creation”.
Roman Jacobson
“The image can only be studied through the image, dreaming images as they are composed in dreams”.
Gastón Bachelard, La poétique de la rêverie.
As the
marks of the moon
can report its story,
we must look for the marks
in Atchugarry’s sculptures
to decode his mark.
Above all
it talks to us
its material,
the prime matter,
the marble
white Carrara marble.
Sometimes
pink marble from Portugal,
black marble from Belgium,
gray Bardiglio marble.
Other times
the metal:
bronze,
iron,
steel.
Circumstantially,
the wood.
And why not?
the twisted roots
of old olive tress
with their obliged
serpentine writing.
Uneasy
repertoire of materials
always
pursuing
a new dimension
for his formal vocation.
Of the actual sculptures
few hold a title
(would they be capable of admitting it?).
The ones that do,
do not report intentions,
motivations
of its author.
We know of his
initial formation
without known patterns,
of his figurative
point of departure
surrounding the religious theme:
several Pietá,
crucifixions,
Via Crucis,
and, meaningfully,
already in his definitive language
a Great Angel, 2006,
a Pomona, 1994,
and not much more.
Then,
the escape of all figuration:
barely any traces.
The form:
the religious transfigured
in diffuse sentiment.
Drastic disappearance of content
ideational
figurative:
the human being,
nature.
No mythologies.
No allegories.
Barely some homage,
no allegorical pretentions:
Monumento alla civiltà e cultura del lavoro, Lecco, 2002.
However,
we could not say
about these sculptures
what Sartre says about Calder’s:
“It does not suggest anything…
its motives do not mean anything…
they do not remit to anything that is not themselves.
They are, that is all:
they are absolutes”.
Apparently
he eludes all allegorical resource,
symbolic.
He obeys only
to the suggestions
of the sculptural language:
matter,
volume,
planes,
void,
space,
light…
Nothing that differs,
from the classicist
dimensions.
In spite of his incursion
in the territory of techniques
and modern materials
his art is maintained
on the sideline of the
technological dimension,
away from
the emptied subjectivity
of a Calder
or a Pevsner.
They have no echo here.
Their abstract forms,
inevitable,
do not exclude
an implicit dimension,
that impose an order
in the inert
in the organic
in the fantastic natural,
and in that which is subject to
birth
growth
without leaving aside
tricky forms
simulations of life.
Only footprints,
sand eroded by
the wind,
the water,
matter suddenly lightened:
the ungraspable form
of the clouds,
the changing profile
of the flames,
the waterfalls.
Some of the scarce titles
insinuate it:
Hydric Energy, 2006.
Vital harmony, 2007.
Lines of energy, 2007.
Energetic Jungle, 2007.
Colloquial presence
with nature
without the mimetic temptation:
with art history,
without anguish over the influences.
Automatism:
the gesture
before the form.
The instinct,
Dada:
“The works arrive,
gentle
or strange,
hostile,
inexplicable,
mute,
or sleepy.
They are born by themselves”
Hans Arp
From the rigid involve
of vast laying stone
to the Neolithic menhir
mute testimony
of the primeval human verticality
with its cosmological times:
obelisks,
crystalline structures
failures,
fractures,
desencounters
in the vertical continuum,
ondulatory
polyphonic
of pleats:
Journey towards the light, 2007,
rests of the shipwreck
of the decomposition of cubists planes
submitted
to a soft,
fluid,
reverberating
sensual and polished
biomorphic abstraction:
Hans Arp,
Tanguy.
The unsettling encounter of Bernini
with Dadá
in a pedestal
over the grass
of the Park of Manantiales.
Petrified marvel,
the figuration of the pliets
brings us together,
on that road,
to the innocent,
leveled
archaic pleats
Hellenic,
those ineffable equilibriums
of reason and nature
of classicism
slightly draped,
humid,
adhering tightly
to the skin
to the body
inscribing in the
nature of the order of
gold pythagoric rhythms.
And those other
closest to roman pragmatism;
heavy pleats
obedient to gravity:
statue of
Augusto Prima Porta:
rhetorical prothesis of power;
superimposed
gravid cloths and shell
to the Hellenic nude of the Doryphoros.
And on that same path
the renaissance
neoplatonical
Piety of Michael Angel
prudish and oedipal
interposition of the cloth
of the cloak
between the hand of the Virgin and
the body of Christ,
disencounter between the divine
and the humane.
And finally Bernini,
baroque vortex
shivery convergence
Greece and Rome
with cristianity:
Apolo and Daphne
Extasis of St. Theresa,
Angel with crown of thorns,
voluptuosity of pleats and folds
marmoreal virtuosity,
echoes of cloths
morbid skin
hairs,
spines,
vegetation of laurels:
metamorphosis.
All submerged in the
history
of the planet,
of society,
of art
but present in the memory
of the matter,
in its treatment
metaphorical.
All a genealogy
biomorphic convened.
“Leave the flowers and the leaves,
take the stem”.
Victor Horta
Art Nouveau,
Hector Guimard:
of the soft and carnivorous