Albert Baronian and Renos Xippas are proud to present A New Frame of Mind, a solo exhibition of new and existing works by Argentinian-born sculptor and designer Pablo Reinoso (b. 1955).
Alongside a curated selection of the artist’s iconic sculpture series, including new “Frames” and a newly-designed “Garabatos” bench, this exhibition will be the first in Belgium to showcase his new Indian ink works on paper wherein the artist moves on from a project-oriented approach to drawing in order to explore the pictorial surface more freely, inaugurating an altogether new form of expression.
Through a witty and joyful lens, Reinoso transports his viewers into a universe that defies the familiar. Ubiquitous design objects such as benches and frames emancipate themselves from their intended purpose. Suddenly, the wood unleashes its inner desires and returns to its vegetal state, playful as it grows roots and branches. Tools no longer serve a master, but acquire...a new life of their own. The artist’s “Uprooted” series presents fallen tree branches that begin a second life through the support of heavier materials such as steel and bronze. His drawings, quieter, respond to a new pace of life within the context of worldwide lockdowns. In spite of this, these works are full of life, their abstractness creating powerful resonances with nature.
Over the course of his career, Reinoso has expanded the boundaries of his practice to challenge the formal and conceptual relationship between art and design. His practice, like himself, is interdisciplinary. While he was trained as an architect, his work exists in-between sculpture, design and architecture and spans across various media, from wood, to marble, steel, textile and ink on paper. His materials play an important role in the conceptual underpinnings of his works. Through its formal and material qualities, Reinoso’s oeuvre engages with nature, playing on its meaning, creating subtle and poetic metaphors. These metaphors can stand for the relation between nature and humankind, but nature itself can become a metaphor in its own right, it can at times even become a metonymy for the human condition.
These themes are present from his earliest works. From 1970 to 1980s, the artist focused on sculpture and space, using noble materials to create artworks that not only represented space, but responded to it such as Les Articulations (1970-1980) or Paysages d’Eau (1981-1986). In the 1990s, he expanded his investigation of space through a radical shift in his work, namely through his Breathing Sculptures (1995-2002). These powerful installations replicating the act of human breathing, exist in the space in-between sculpture and architecture, commenting on the precariousness of human life. In the early 2000s, Reinoso inaugurated his “Thoneteando” series, inspired by humankind’s first industrial design object: the famed Thonet chair #14. By divesting the chair of its primary function, Pablo Reinoso conferred a new symbolism to this iconic object, juxtaposing multiple elements to create visual choreographies and narratives. Later on, he focused on another seating object - the public bench - in order to create one of his best-known works: the “Bancs Spaghetti”. His “Frames” and “Tools” series similarly build on the theme of reversal of every-day objects, pushed beyond their functional limits.
His drawing series represent a new technique and a new avenue of investigation that responds and expands on his previous work. For the first time, Reinoso left his architectural drawings behind him, distancing himself from line drawing to focus instead on abstraction and chiaro-scuro. The black Indian ink is applied with a brush to the prepared paper. The images are constructed, one brush stroke at a time. The ink chips away at the whiteness of the paper almost like a sculptor chips away at his stone per via di levare. The drawings, like his sculptures, are ambiguous. While they are abstract, the artist is careful not to characterize them as pure abstraction. Rather, they offer signifiers, but the signified is never defined. These drawings are about artistic freedom, the artist sets the boundaries of his work but does not define in advance where the process will take him. Whilst they are not referencing anything directly, the drawings exude the artist’s passion for nature. Transcending scale, they offer a vision of our universe both through the lens of a telescope a hey exist between two planes, on a macro scale they could be celestial events, like the birth of a star, or, on a micro level, they offer a vision of our planet through an electron microscope.
This dialogue between his two and three-dimensional works not only offers a nuanced insight into his conceptual process, but also reveal the artist’s celebration of nature and its materials, offering a truly new frame of mind.
Entrada actualizada el el 19 may de 2022
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