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 currently on show consists of a number of sculptures and drawings made during 2019 plus two mural interventions evolved from two drawings originally dating from 1989. Both of them interrogate the precise, functional architecture of the exhibition space. L1 expands over the wall like a vast anamorphosis while L3 tempers its original forms as it turns into a body that brings into question the virtual quality of the mural.

The murals contain, fragment and reorder their surrounding environs.

The sculptures position themselves.

Some of the keys to Irazu’s practice, ever since he first made an impact on sculpture in the eighties, and which are still visible in his new works, lie in the ideas of presence, material, colour, surface, scale and perception. His sculpture originally developed from iron and wood which later came to be replaced by plywood and by cast elements. The paint and the material deposited on any of these supports accentuated the hybrid and objectual quality which underpin his practice in each of his various periods.

Alternating the rhythm of the formal and material relationships and the gestural impact, the current sculptures are ordered around different moments of the process which function like time phases that tell everything about themselves, bringing us closer to a mutable sculpture in which past and future are crystalized as an image.

The key to the work is finding the precise balance in which the noise of the process is gradually silenced and the fuzzy boundaries between the manifold possibilities of the sculpture become clear-cut.

In point of fact, the presence of recognisable objects and welded or cast volumes is also counterpointed by a more complex gestural and diffuse development. What is apparently a defined form is largely owing to freer spaces which lend greater presence to the imprecise and the blurred.

Irazu’s new sculptures are formal concretion and a layered accumulation of visual possibilities with mutating gradations and a quasi-geological development in which, like the tremor announcing an imminent crisis, the sum of inner gestures shapes the visible layer of the surface.