Moving throughout artisan visualities, discarded supplies, and human-animal figures, Marcelo Pombo’s apply shows a tactile and visible repertoire that sculpts its personal world and opens the risk of multiplying the current. The exhibition, Marcelo Pombo: Starting Point to Artisanal Conceptualism at Barro Gallery in New York City, brings collectively works from the artist’s early profession in the 1980s to the current, together with a sequence of pencil and combined media drawings, and works made with discovered objects.
“Cortinita (Little Curtain)” (1993), made of polyester and nylon cloth with inexperienced and blue plastic appliqués, hangs at the finish of the predominant room. By its facet, “Mosquitero (Mosquito net)” (1990) made of metallic cloth and interwoven with artificial pearls, additionally follows Pombo’s exploration of discovered and disposable objects. Affection and sweetness, but in addition fragility and impermanence, are linked in the cautious crafting of these works. Created throughout the 1990s world rise of neoliberalism, these items embellish and reward mundane and discarded objects. This gesture resonates with present feminist actions in Latin America that spotlight the significance of undervalued care practices beneath capitalist logic.
The hint of woven actions follows throughout the area. A bunch of 5 mixed-media drawings, made between the years 2022 and 2023, depicts threads that alternate between string plots and unfastened waves. In two of the Untitled drawings, wefts of materials, patches, and coloured threads undertake hand-like extremities. These advanced and intriguing drawings remodel threads and needles into dwelling organisms which might be lively, but in addition contentious.
The pencil works included in The São Paulo Drawings contextualize the artist’s expertise in São Paulo in the early 1980s, the place he was concerned with homosexual rights activism. In the exhibition catalogue, Pombo describes this expertise as the key to his “identification with sexual diversity and counterculture.” This sequence depicts layered scenes of pleasure, ache, intercourse, and eroticism, with grotesque, monstrous, abject, human-animal characters, and Disneyland sparkles. Paradisiacal, but often anchored in pure and concrete eventualities that resemble actuality, the drawings set off imaginaries for different worlds and displace the physique in direction of metamorphic entities.
Working on the edge between craft and artwork, the hand and the needle, our bodies and metamorphosis, Pombo’s work sculpts alternative routes of being and interrelating. As the dwelling cloth that weaves itself might recommend, these must-see reunited works advocate for the language of on a regular basis issues and the tales of the forgotten.
Artisanal Conceptualism: Starting Point continues at Barro New York (25 Peck Slip, Seaport, Manhattan) via May 20. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
