Pablo Echaurren

Painter, illustrator, book author and video artist, over the arc of his artistic career Pablo Echaurren (Roma, 1951) has also created a body of collages that sublimate his cultural and collecting passions.

In his collages, the artist – son of the Surrealist painter Sebastian Matta – assembles scraps of paper, old and new, and cut-out fragments of Futurist newspapers and books, mixing the sacred and the profane through references to both the historical avant-garde and cartoon characters. Bold juxtapositions that, in the spirit of iconoclasm and love for the paper world, represent the other, dark, desecrating side of bibliophilic activity.

In an ars combinatoria aimed to stun and bewilder, he brazenly mixes the high and the low in surprising pairings, reinterpreting and renewing a genre that the avantgardes themselves had codified.

London, Estorick Collection, March - May 2014