MACRO – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma – is presenting the outstanding, sophisticated ceramic works of Pablo Echaurren on the walls of the central Hall. Six works create a most unsuspected interaction between Baroque and rock music, in an intermingling of genres and worlds that disorients both eye and mind.
Baroque’n’roll is the name of the new project by Pablo Echaurren, the Rome-born artist whose work ranges from painting to sculpture, to illustration and collage. Like the Baroque niches that dot the streets and squares of Rome, six large ceramic sculptures, made by Bottega Gatti in Faenza, populate the main hall of the Museum.
Drawing on his profound understanding of the Baroque, Echaurren has reinterpreted the dynamic, whirling style, bringing reminiscences of the past alive with modern images linked to rock music: the niches – small aedicules that once housed religious images – contain a variety of electric bass guitars, giving material form to the obsessive, revolutionary rhythms of rock ’n’ roll.
The artist says. “My aedicules sanctify an instrument that is a beating heart, an electric heart, a collective heart. They narrate it in sculptural form and offer it to the passer-by. Everyone can find their own music in the various types of bass guitar, and reconstruct a soundtrack or download an entire mental playlist.”
His poetic vision of the sensational and the fabulous, and the idea of art as a form of figurative thinking, allegory, metamorphism, and the grotesque, paradoxes, witticisms, and dreams constitute the Baroque notes that Echaurren absorbs into his work.
Other aspects of the diversified, simultaneous, and all-enveloping aesthetic of the Baroque have always run through the artist’s characteristic style, in which horror vacui is both a fear of and attraction to the abyss, and a form of logical and perceptive disorientation.
Following his paradoxical, iconoclastic and highly imaginative way of thinking, Echaurren brings the Baroque onto a collision course with rock – and not just because of some facile assonance between their names. Rock too leads to a loss of identity, prompting dizzying movements, breaking down unity and revolving around a number of hubs. Together with his acute reflections on the vocabulary of Futurism, another great source of Echaurren’s training and imagination, these are the fundamental elements of Baroque’n’roll. It is a plastic, provocative, and paradoxical world, in which the undulating shapes of electric bass guitars merge seamlessly into abstract starry skies and richly decorated Baroque frames inhabited by putti and skulls, and golden light.
A catalogue will be published for the exhibition by Gli Ori – Fondazione Echaurren Salaris, with an essay by Nicoletta Zanella, an contribution by Umberto Croppi, and an interview with the artist by Luca Massimo Barbero and one by Guglielmo Gigliotti.
Pablo Echaurren (Rome, 1951) is the son of the Italian actress Angela Faranda and the Chilean painter Roberto Sebastian Matta Echaurren. He started painting at the age of eighteen and, from 1973 to 1975, he exhibited in Rome, Milan, Basel, Philadelphia, Zurich, Berlin, New York, and Brussels. In 1975 he took part in the Paris Biennale and in 1983 he was at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome (with Altan and Andrea Pazienza), to which he returned in 1995 with a solo exhibition that paid tribute to Futurism. He has taken part in several group exhibitions, including “Anniottanta” (Bologna, 1985), the 11th Quadriennale (Rome, 1986), and “Artoon” (Rome, 1989). In the early 1970s, during the final years of Pop Art, Arte Povera, Minimalism and Conceptual Art, he started creating a stylistic world of his own, drawing on various sources of inspiration, from Hokusai to Roy Lichtenstein’s comic-strip works, but also from the scientific illustrations of natural-history books and the world of comics. Later on, his constructive confrontation with the history of art broadened out into a constant dialogue with the historic avant-gardes, which he revisited through his vision as an inhabitant of a global village filled with mass-media messages and computer images.
His artistic research also branched out into the world of multiplied art, and he has designed covers, posters, calendars, advertisements, and comic strips. He has been an Academician of San Luca since 1997. In 2004 the City of Rome promoted the anthological “Pablo Echaurren. Dagli anni settanta a oggi” exhibition in the rooms of the Chiostro del Bramante.
After the solo display at the Auditorium di Roma (2006), devoted to his favourite band, the Ramones, he made a film, The Holy Family, in 2007. In 2009, MIAAO (Museo Internazionale di Arti Applicate Oggi) in Turin celebrated the centenary of Futurism with an exhibition based around Echaurren’s work. In 2010, Fondazione Roma Museo put on a retrospective (curated by Nicoletta Zanella) entitled “Crhomo Sapiens”.