For the last thirty years Pello Irazu’s practice has engaged with the foundational issues of sculpture, in the widest conception of the category. From a material viewpoint, these are channelled not only through a myriad of formats, materials and devices, but also through graphic expressions like drawing—in its expanded version—and wall painting. On the other hand, when addressing references and allusions to reality—to the set of representations that conform it—his work is plagued with slippages between the material, plastic sign and the remainder of signs circulating within the social sphere. In both cases, the very dimensions of his varied forms of expressions are nothing but a concentration of a relational space of multiple dimensions always viewed through the optic of sculpture.

The exhibition on view at CarrerasMugica showcases a set of four large sculptures alongside other smaller ones plus a number of drawings made over recent months whose titles are culled from a matrix of core ideas (Siluetas / Masas / Sombras / Perfiles / Bultos / Espectros / Leyendas / Desechos / Espantos /// Silhouettes / Masses / Shadows / Profiles / Mounds / Spectres / Legends / Waste / Horrors) which are explicit allusions to the slippage at play between the various categories of signs used.

At an initial, very elementary level, the forms these works generate are sourced from a process of concentrating objects which then forego this status as they become silhouettes, masses or shadows: a photo with pieces of furniture that coalesce into one single silhouetted image, a set of different sized cardboard boxes that are subsumed in an unbroken mass, and a piece that casts a shadow which is transmuted into matter and then materially incorporated into the work.

On a deeper, secondary level, the forms thus generated begin to outline specific profiles, both gestaltically and idiosyncratically speaking, and take on a singular presence, like mounds whose lineage can be traced back to precise cultural identifications. Such forms also house certain familiar spectres or forbearers with which we can identify a necessarily agonising relationship; much like the sixteenth century Mannerist artist who loved and hated his model so intensely that only by destroying it could he manage to give it its rightful place and also stake out a place for himself. In this way, the profiles, mounds and spectres of Basque sculpture—Oteiza, Chillida and Ibarrola—are convened in a tenuous phantasmagoria of differences.

Finally, a third state places us on the level of the social. While traditionally, art’s iconographic programmes, especially the sculptural form by dint of its monumental mandate, were vehicles for content which wished to moralise and to transmit certain values to society. In the case of Basque sculpture from the 1960s and 70s, despite its abstract expression, all of this was fulfilled in a peculiar fashion: the forms were not subjected metaphorically to the dictates of the content; on the other hand, it was the forms themselves—a certain catalogue of forms—that metonymically managed to construe a meaning that was as ambiguous as it was recognisable, around which a popular identification was possible.

The larger sculptures in this exhibition hark back to this close-at-hand tradition and, at once, bring it into question. Unlike the fine quality of the material usually employed in shaping its forms, and on which a large part of its communicative effectiveness lied, in this case, these materials come directly from the rubbish tip, from the recycling of waste taken from the garbage. In addition, the legibility of the forms within a hypercoded model is relativised by the inclusion of “legends”—elements conceived to be read—which, in the case of these pieces, are based on a poetic suspension of published opinion at a moment of social disintegration: pages from newspapers manipulated with areas of colour that short-circuit the flow of information of the headings. In short, they are great articulated (counter-monumental) masses which, far from paying testimony to the integration of a collective around certain values and beliefs, poetically bring into play a horror of, and disaffection towards, the self and its foundations.