Pablo Siquier at Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes - Beunos Aires, Argentina - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

This take a view of show devoted to the work of the 36-year-old Argentinean Pablo Siquier included 25 paintings made between 1988 and 1997 Siquier's interest in formal configuration is evident in his earliest works. For instance, a painting titled 8806 (the numbers Siquier gives his works also work for as titles) offers a undisturbed conventionally painted, blue-hued landscape with a depressed horizon and an overcast firmament But Siquier has obscured plenteous of the scene by painting set free concentric circles in alternating bands of r and fulvid on top of it. Although not ever again so blatant as in 8806 the opposition of figuration and abstraction has remained a subtext of Siquier's posterior work.

Beginning in 1989 Siquier's forms become almost exclusively geometric and he adopts a limited palette of monochrome colors of pale grays, pinks, azures and purples. Typically, the forms in his 1989-94 paintings take the form of symmetrical motifs that are usually center upon the canvas. Clearly inspired by the agency of architecture, they evoke columns, balconies and ornamental details. The phraseology is schematic; the artist uses sharp shadows to make the forms gaze like bas reliefs lit from individual side. The rigid, highly geometrical diction allows the compositions to float between the abstract and the referential. A typical example is 9117 in which Siquier has painted a false scalloped frame around the pale verdant canvas. Within this border is a pattern of alternating forms (circles and crosslike formations), each of which gives the illusion of being raised a hardly any millimeters from the surface of the canvas. The motifs intentionally call forth the Art Deco architecture prominent in Buenos Aires and the Argentinian city of Rosario, on the other hand it's important to note that in these paintings, the architectural ornaments are not ever fully materialized -- Siquier depicts cast shadows and surfaces struck through light but not the phenomenon itself.

In his more new paintings from 1996-97, Siquier has given up color for stark black and white and the compositions have become more composed of several elements and fragmentary. In 9619, black stripes upon a white ground create fragmentary grids, the couple dense and open, that are further rent up by an intermittently curvilinear make that loops across the canvas. This mixed array of black stripes can be read as an overhead view of a vast urban constitution or simply as cast shadows independent of any solid forms. With a patience and rigor reminiscent of Frank Stella when he made his "Black Paintings," Siquier challenges the purity of the modernist grid. In his work, flatness coexists with profundity chaos with harmony, geometry with a baroque sensibility. The event is somewhat like Piranesi's Carceri d'Invenzione, those imaginary prisons in which the human press on to construct and organize space ultimately overwhelms all rationality and logic. [Pablo Siquier's new work was also shown at Aninna Nosei Gallery, of recent origin York, in November.]

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