Marcelo Pombo

The past twenty-five years in Argentine art cannot be fully understood without taking into account the Centro Cultural Rojas: a makeshift art space that, though a part of the Universidad de Buenos Aires, remained proudly marginal. Marcelo Pombo was an important player in the group that emerged there and turned its back on the figure of the socially committed Latin American intellectual, concentrating instead on the intimate, decorative, and superficial. No one took that précieux extravagance as far as Pombo, whose cheap materials and handicraft gave shape to ordinary, excessive, and hard-to-categorize beauty. Early debate over whether his work was camp, queer, neo-baroque, or rococo trash today makes little difference. What stands out in his first retrospective, curated by Inés Katzenstein, is the love and devotion that still drives his creation.

With Pombo, feeling takes precedence. His appropriation of a soap box, for instance, in Skip ultra intelligent, 1996, in no way partakes of the cynicism of the Warholian readymade. The strident packaging only begins conversation between the artist’s immediate environment, with its stickers and fake jewels, and his obsessive—and disarmingly charming—use of pointillism. Similarly, in Noche estrellada con casas en las montañas (Starry Night with Houses in the Mountains), 2012, everyday objects—in this case, small purses—seem to parade across a nighttime landscape on a wooden panel as if in a beauty contest under the starry sky. Pombo’s lyricism elevates viewers to a utopian state where taste is democratized and pleasure lies in what is at hand—ultimately, a resoundingly political stance.

Translated from Spanish by Jane Brodie.