Past Events
NICOLAS ROBBIO
Indirections
2
December 2008 - 15 January 2009
Images
Biography
The
Pharos Centre for Contemporary Art is pleased to present
Brazilian artist Nicolas Robbio’s exhibition
Indirections.
Nicolás Robbio’s work begins in an intimate
observation of everyday things: common objects, situations, and
systems. Attentive to the limits of what is close at hand, he
produces a sensitive economy of images. Closely observed details
are subtracted, and outlined by drawing onto or cutting into
paper and other found materials. These elements are isolated or
re-combined to occupy spaces of varying scale and dimension:
from individual drawings to notebooks and rooms. They are
overlaid between sheets of paper or glass; constructed as new
three-dimensional objects, and drawn, incised, or projected on
walls.
Consistently precise, deceptively simple, this
method of representation is an intricate synthesis; it brings
together diagrammatic outline, illusion and the material
qualities of things. The effect is to underline the interstice
between reality and representation and also to see the
commonplace taken apart and re-assembled from elemental parts
and qualities. By careful handling, selection and
re-configuration, our objects of general knowledge are re-placed
as carriers of personal memory and collective meaning.
Over the past four years, one of the ways in
which Robbio’s work has developed is via focused individual
exhibitions and his show for the PCCA Nicosia forms a part of
this sequence. Each is approached as a specific project, and
becomes in itself a composite work in which previously made
works are brought into a new relationship with those created in
situ.
Across varying media, a clear process of thought emerges.
From wall drawings to
the subtle placement of objects, drawings and projections, each
element suggests an intimate yet indirect relationship to
others, to the space that it occupies, and to the situation from
which it draws.
Curator, Isobel Whitelegg, TrAIN Research Fellow, University of
the Arts London
Nicolás Robbio (Mar del Plata, Argentina, 1975) graduated from
the Escuela Superior de Artes Visuales Martin A. Malharro in
1999 and has lived and worked in São Paulo, Brazil since 2001.
In 2006 he was awarded the Rumos prize for contemporary visual
art for an installation of drawings and objects entitled As
boas intenções não são sempre as melhores (Good intentions are
not always the best) Working individually and in
collaboration with other artists, his practice extends to the
production of artists books and editions, with recent
commissions including a print for the Museum of Modern Art, São
Paulo and a book for the forthcoming Trienal Poli/Gráfica in San
Juan. His work is in public collections in Argentina, Brazil and
the UK.