Pablo
Accinelli
Nubes
de paso
08.10—
11.12.18

Curatorial text

Fleeting, murky, or porous, clouds are masses that, depending on their density, block or dissipate the visible light. Pablo Accinelli engages densities that range from the feather weight of a paperclip to the dead weight of a bag of cement. Many of his works make use of natural elements—dust particles, molecules of air or of water—that slip into the crevices of each form. Inner and outer relationships are thus established between materials and their surroundings, between containers and contents, relationships that are enabled by the many conduits that penetrate his work. What we have here are perforated, rather than fragmented, bodies. The tension between concrete elements and those more volatile suggests theories of positive and negative space and hint at ways to explore the artist’s versatile production.   

Beyond a narrow passage delimited by the walls of the bookstore and the escalator is the museum’s basement level. An idle place, the basement is understood as such insofar as it holds cleaning and construction supplies, and acts as storage space. This staging of things whose functionality has been altered produces an ecosystem not unlike an induced dream where the rules of the game are combined and turned around. On the verge of use, objects are caught in a workless time, in a placid non-doing. Slow forms scattered throughout the space resemble an abandoned movie set or, as Sigfried Kracauer describes in his essay Calico-World, “A bad dream about objects that has been forced into the corporeal realm… Everything guaranteed unnatural and everything exactly like nature…” [Siegfried Kracauer, The mass ornament]

The show Nubes de paso [Passing Clouds] entails, among other things, a brackish underflow of contemporary life. Our experience of it is immediate, and yet we have the lingering sense that there is something intangible; a balance between body and mind takes shape through different states of matter, from gaseous and liquid to more solid phases. The works’ titles—Duración interna/externa [Internal/External Duration], Relación interna/externa [Internal/External Relation]—suggest hermetic research and reflect a lexicon established by the artist to grapple with each piece as a system that, when repeated in space, depicts a mental landscape. As the show’s title suggests, this instrument that can be endlessly unfolded measures the temperature of an opaque and uncertain moment. 

—Florencia Cherñajovsky