Sebastián Gordin

Buenos Aires, Argentina – 1969

            Sebastián Gordín began his artistic career in the mid-eighties as a cartoonist and editor of underground comics. Since then, he has worked in painting, installations, the construction of objects that are hard to classify, sculpture and, occasionally, performance and video. His enormous talent for constructing objects and stagings of great visual appeal connects with the sensibility of all audiences. Although he was born in Buenos Aires in 1969, he feels he was born in 1976, when he started elementary school in the midst of the military dictatorship. Hiding and smuggling are part of his way of going through art. 

            He remembers his school years as a great torment he was able to exorcise when he entered the Instituto Manuel Belgrano to study Fine Arts. There he became friends with a group that included Esteban Pagés, Emiliano Miriyo, Máximo Lutz and Carlos Subosky, who introduced him to what he describes as "class B graphic production". Together, they created a comic book magazine and began to exhibit in emblematic underground places of that time, such as Cemento, Parakultural and Medio Mundo Varieté. This scene turned out to be an essential milestone in their formation. 

            After some exhibitions, including one at the Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana (ICI), he had a crisis that distanced him from the creative processes and brought him closer to B class cinema. For a long period, he would watch all the films he could get his hands on. It was at that time when he decided to give a friend an object inspired by the films he watched as a birthday present. From this, he inaugurated a series of works he initially gave as gifts but later began to show. The relationship between the films he was watching and the art he was producing had to do essentially with the extreme use of a minimal resource. In his repertoire we also find references to the games of his early years. It is about the construction of small boxes containing objects, with a singular pictorial component, which generate the effect of the painting seemingly contained in these artifacts.

            He later became more sophisticated in this proposal until he came to his showcases, which display moments frozen in time, an unfinished narrative full of clues for the viewer. Gordín is a consumer of every element of popular cultures, a scholar and a freak. He thinks of art as a machinery that produces devices to see reality in a different way. A gathering artist who does not discard anything, his craft consists of always reinventing himself and making of his work an infinite art.