Pablo Reinoso - A world upside down
Maison de l’Amérique Latine, Paris
Curated by Jérôme Sans
1st June - 5th september 2015
This monographic exhibition puts into perspective more than 30 years of Pablo Reinoso's singular approach. The latter, has literally appropriated the place for the occasion in order to better overturn it. Steel arabesques, wooden volutes or marble landscapes, the works of Pablo Reinoso (born in 1955), somewhere between sculpture and design, free themselves from their initial form of use to disrupt our environment and bring it into a new dimension. Echoing and in contrast to minimal art, Pablo Reinoso's sculptures play on the rigidity of the forms and everyday objects they inhabit to give them a sudden expansion. They unfold like embodied, moving, impermanent bodies that cannot be limited to their size or function.
In a logic of extension of the materials, his sculptures or environments, real visual surprises stemming from a minimalist aesthetic of the 60s, would have taken shape, would have been endowed with life. From his Breathing sculptures, which are not just pure forms but breathin-like animated bodies, to his famous Spaghettis Benchs, from which branches gradually contaminate their environment, and to the series based on the iconic Thonet chairs, Pablo Reinoso's works renew our perception of the objects that surround us. Why should the works only be sculptures and not become pedestals to embody benches, chairs or simply structures to be activated? Double-sided works that would no longer be afraid to be as functional as they are visual. Forms and volumes to be freely appropriated, without instructions or restraint. In a light and "natural" way, Pablo Reinoso overturns the codes of art and respectful behaviour, at a distance from the work of art. What if art were to extend its territory?
Reversing spatial reference points or drawing multiple volutes evoking the inexorable growth of the plant world in an urban environment, his sculptures reinvent the senses, tipping the environment into an imaginary world where wood, marble, bronze and steel come to life, as if animated by the breath of a breath. These noble materials seem to defy time and the laws of gravity, in the image of a wild and vivacious nature which, above all, takes its rights.
Whether they are conducive to contemplation or invite intimacy, his installations create a strangely fantastic atmosphere, like so many enigmas referring to the meanders of the unconscious. The Maison de l'Amérique latine becomes the setting for new hallucinatory experiments by Pablo Reinoso. The artist takes over the place to breathe into it the first lines of a new story. A world turned upside down.
Exhibition view, Pablo Reinoso, Un monde renversé, Maison de l'Amérique Latine, Paris, 2015 © Suzanne Nagy
Exhibition view, Pablo Reinoso, Un monde renversé, Maison de l'Amérique Latine, Paris, 2015 © Suzanne Nagy
Exhibition view, Pablo Reinoso, Un monde renversé, Maison de l'Amérique Latine, Paris, 2015 © Suzanne Nagy
Exhibition view, Pablo Reinoso, Un monde renversé, Maison de l'Amérique Latine, Paris, 2015 © Suzanne Nagy
Exhibition view, Pablo Reinoso, Un monde renversé, Maison de l'Amérique Latine, Paris, 2015 © Suzanne Nagy
Exhibition view, Pablo Reinoso, Un monde renversé, Maison de l'Amérique Latine, Paris, 2015 © Suzanne Nagy