Pablo Siquier

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1961

            Educated artistically in the late 1980s, in inseparable contact with his interest in architecture and design. Trained at the Prilidiano Pueyrredón National School of Fine Arts, he was part of the emblematic "Grupo de la X" and also a professor of Graphic Design at the University of Buenos Aires. Siquier's production emerges as a reaction to the rise of expressionist and subjective painting that had returned with force during that time. His attention to form and geometry, to the play of light and shadow, however, is not exhausted in a purifying gesture, but is driven by a very marked vital interest in capturing an intangible dimension of urban experience. From there arise his patterns, a characteristic mark of his work, from which series proliferate whose sense seems to reside less in the result obtained than in the effect of continuity and constancy.

            Thus, his "ornaments" or "emblems," derived from decorative figures on the facades of Buenos Aires and rooted in modern architecture and urbanism inspired by Le Corbusier, outline a method of his own, a discipline that functions by erasing all reference, to become a meticulous and demanding exercise in which projections, straight lines, curves, diagonals, undulating lines, grids, and floral motifs compose a grammar of repetition and variation that emulates the rhythm in a city, its infinite tension between chaos and order. Once a material, grid, or scheme is exhausted, another is used; once a scale is traversed, the possibility of extending to a larger surface opens up until reaching monumentality; from monochrome, it is possible to venture into expressions of modest chromaticism.

            In this way, his work is essentially influenced by the dynamics of the formal languages of music and mathematics and operates as the result of an infinitely deferred matrix, spiraling into an experimental loop: canvas, paper, mural; pencil, ink, charcoal, form the repertoire of techniques that have the effect of a permanent state of openness. Never stabilizing in an idea of self-contained work, Siquier insists on movement and, therefore, on play, complexifying the idea of an external world that presents itself as given. The effect is the pursuit of a more potent mimesis that does not aim at the things of this world, but at the forces that animate them.