Pablo Insurralde

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1980

            Always focused on the links between materials and their semantics, from his sculptures and ceramics, Insaurralde has unfolded a whole range of meanings that radiate towards notions such as the weak, the provisional, the contingent, and the ethereal. In this sense, the double nature of his working style, not only in terms of his préciosité workmanship, but also with regard to his design perspective, removes his work from any approach that exhausts it in its aesthetic or playful power and turns it into a platform for critical interventions on how the contemporary world manipulates and produces illusions. 

            Trained at the Universidad Nacional de las Artes, in Argentina, and as a resident of the R.A.R.O. program in Madrid, Spain, he investigated the properties of ceramics. In that latter city, he exhibited Cuadrilátero, a dense sequence of scenes occurring in space that shapes an enigmatic physical and semiotic struggle between the arranged materials. The hyper-realistic reproduction of domestic, ordinary objects and images challenges the viewer's imagination. Another of his pieces, Música Congelada (Frozen Music), a monumental mobile of heavy objects that jingle as they rub against each other, also brings into play the problem of the translation of sculptural, visual, and sonorous language. He has received the honorable mentions of the Braque Prize (2017) and the Concurso Nacional de UADE en Artes Visuales (2015), as well as national training grants from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes and other organizations. 

            Embracing both the non-figurative syntax of modern sculpture and hyper-realist aesthetics, his attention is focused on the conceptual and sensitive effects of his installations on space and people. His work returns to the question of the environment of sensations and images that saturates the present and through which bonds and relationships, always fragile and transitory, are established. In contrast with these coordinates, his work seems to suggest the possibility of a sensitive engagement with the world, the exercise of meticulous attention, and the ethics of a passionate goldsmith when shaping his objects.