Pablo Reinoso — Xippas Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 19 → July 23, 2022

We are pleased to announce Pablo Reinoso’s first solo exhibition at Xippas Paris, in parallel with the “Débordements” exhibition presented at the Domaine national de Chambord (May 1st — September 4th). The artist has taken over the two floors of the gallery to transform them into a place of experimentation, where the materials are freed from their rigidity and come to life. Like wild plants, wood and metal escape of their own accord. They proliferate, crawling along walls and floors or taking root on the ceilings. The exhibition, of institutional ambition, presents iconic pieces and more recent productions, but also some rare and historical works, enabling a perspective over time.

Vue de l’exposition Pablo Reinoso à la galerie Xippas, Paris © Galerie Xippas, Paris, 2022

Pablo Reinoso (born in 1955 in Argentina) is known for his multidisciplinary practice that transforms functional objects from the world of architecture and design into entities in their own right. Following four principles that he borrows from wild nature — reproduction, exuberance, branching and expansion — he “greens” inanimate elements. Once transformed, they blur the boundaries between figuration and abstraction, but also between inside and outside, and call our relationship to space and landscapes into question.

Vue de l’exposition Pablo Reinoso à la galerie Xippas, Paris © Galerie Xippas, Paris, 2022

After his obsession with the Thonet chair, the first industrial design object in history, which he has reinterpreted in thousands of ways, Pablo Reinoso tackled more anonymous protagonists — tools, benches, frames. With a spirited lightness and a humour proper to his gesture, he removed them from the space of their usefulness and transplanted them into the field of play. Thus, the crosspieces of the benches are loosened, curled, and carried away in an improvised dance. The frames unframe and no longer serve to delimit the space, but to invade it. The walls decompose and seem on the brink of crashing like waves. Almost functional, but not quite, Pablo Reinoso’s oxymoron-sculptures harbour a contradiction and embody a suspended movement. A “mobile immobility,” to use Michel Serres’ definition.

And yet, Pablo Reinoso’s works do not merely divert the elements of language proper to the aesthetics of design. They are rooted in a broader vision, with biomorphic motifs. This vision is characterised by a deep respect for nature, an ethical stance, but also a real fascination, to the point of imitation, generating “landscapes, movement, waves, life, time, breathing.” Sculpting life forms in matter.

Vue de l’exposition Pablo Reinoso à la galerie Xippas, Paris © Galerie Xippas, Paris, 2022

Pablo Reinoso is a Franco-Argentine artist who has lived and worked in Paris since 1978. His work has been exhibited in international institutions and in the framework of major artistic events, including the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Georges Pompidou Centre, the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Grassi Museum in Leipzig, the Boghossian Foundation in Brussels, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, the MUDAC in Lausanne, the CID — Centre d’innovation et de design at Grand Hornu, the Venice Biennale, the FIAC Hors-les-murs, the Bienalsur and AGORA, the Biennale of Bordeaux. His works are part of the collections of the MALBA and the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, the Fonds national d’art contemporain in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo, the MACRO Rosario and the MUSAC in Leon in Spain.

From May 1st to September 4th, 2022, the Domaine national de Chambord (France) will devote a monumental exhibition to him.