ART-PRESENTATION: Pablo Siquier-Bruit

Pablo Siquier in his work analyzes the importance of the legacy of perspective, ornament, and design in both their European modernist and Latin American syncretic versions, and the manners of forging a synthesis with them today; while also making liberal use of formal operations from the history of representation and visual culture to produce drawings where the gaze is constituted as a fundamental element.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Xippas Gallery Archive

 “Bruit”, Pablo Siquier’s first solo exhibition in France presents a large-scale mural and a series of recent paintings at Xippas Gallery in Paris. His work resists historical context and interpretation. His abstract black and white canvases and drawings remain silent, even as they evoke the rhythms of the city and subtly reference architectural ornament. In his work, Siquier explores the tensions between perfect and imperfect media: his art is both hand-made and machine-influenced. Siquier’s early work from the second half of the ‘80s reflects the opposition between the figurative and the abstract, a penchant for details and the artifice, the interplay between figure and ground, between order and formal precision, and the use of vibrant colors. His paintings later employ a more austere palette to reflect exclusively geometric forms, inspired by architectural motifs. From 1993 onwards, he drastically renounces color and embarks on a series of black and white paintings, whilst also eradicating references to architectural ornaments in favor of more complex and articulated compositions.  In his most recent work, Siquier leaves behind the canvas to work directly on the walls of galleries and museums, drawings and installations that operate with the illusion and real perception of space. Via computer generated drawings transferred onto gigantic printed surfaces, these installations appear to erase the borders between painting and the real world. The schematic nature of Pablo Siquier’s work refers to Iannis Xenakis’s music, which the artist names as one of his principal influences. In his new canvases (2017), geometric forms slowly change as they repeat and multiply component to form ruptured structures somewhere between a systematic and an obsessive approach, between abstraction and pattern.

Info: Xippas Gallery, 108 rue Vieille du Temple, Paris, Duration: 25/3-13/5/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-13:00 & 14:00-19:00, Sat 10:00-19:00, www.xippas.com