Ernesto Arellano

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1971

            Ernesto Arellano's career shows him to be both a great sculptor and a true rhapsodist. Surely linked to his attraction to the world of comics, the creatures he builds, and whose universe he has not ceased to unfold since his beginnings, seem to come from an original disposition prompted by the desire for a permanent story encompassing his work. In each piece, he seems to update this narrative art to materialize it in space. Although Arellano became an early professional illustrator, he found in the art world a deregulated space that allowed him to carry out this ethic of play, eroticism, and freedom.

            First drawings and paintings, and then sculptures, the artist created pieces that produce a sort of extravagant mythology in which the creatures depicted are inspired by his youthful consumptions, but which, far from restricting himself to reproducing them, stage an act of appropriation and sovereignty. Arellano held his first solo exhibition at the Centro Cultural Recoleta, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1996, after training in various private and public institutions. In 2000, he received a production grant from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes. He also worked as a curator in several local institutions. 

            Over the years, his production has focused more and more on the use of ceramics, from which he takes advantage of its pictorial and expressive properties, but, above all, its potential to be the support of an exuberant imagination. His formal universe, in turn, established a dialogue with various artistic references, such as Hindu architecture, Rococo aesthetics, and the figures of Bosch and Brueghel, among others. In this way, whether through miniature sculptural ensembles, human scale pieces, or public monuments, he develops a work in which the ornamental excess, the expressive stridency of the color palettes used, and the extraordinary variety of his volumes invite to an enlarged and distorted experience of the world that transports the viewer to new spatial and temporal coordinates.