PABLO ATCHUGARRY- THE LIFE OF THE MATERIAL

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These three adjectives – accessible, immediate and universal – are the key to Pablo’s international success. Applying them to his sculpture, we find, for example, the recognizability of his work, which we know to be a precondition of success. Everyone recognizes Pablo’s sculptures. But there is more to it, obviously. The fact is Pablo’s sculptures are reassuring; they are “good”. It is strange to find that word – so imprecise as a definition and so rare in criticism, in a critical essay – but I believe that it fits perfectly here because it is the analogical equivalent of Pablo’s creative process. The works are good because they are positive and full of hope.

And when these sensations merge with a sort of nostalgia for times when humanity was full of hope for the future, we understand even better the reasons for his success. Returning to analytic criticism, to history and the history of art, we could say that Pablo incarnates what can be called both “modernity” and “Modernity”. He incarnates the first, “modernity”, because his abstraction informed by diverse references – trees, flames, his version of the “Pietà” – is what is commonly meant by “modern”, in a world where everyone knows Picasso and no one knows Duchamp; everyone knows Van Gogh and no one knows Cézanne.

Pablo can also be said to incarnate “Modernity” with a capital “M”, because that historical period now over – yet not far off, and still today a source of endless nostalgia – was the period (the only other being perhaps the Enlightenment) when faith in progress, and thus in the future, spread and flourished, thanks to a common universal will, thanks to grand, universal values, like work, truth and beauty. Who among us does not wish to return to that time? And it is that idea of the future we find embodied in the sculpture of Pablo Atchugarry.

Marco Meneguzzo