Pablo Atchugarry

Giving a shape to the breath that binds all things together. This seems to be the purpose that guides Atchugarry in his approach to sculpture. A goal that is signaled by the 'respiratory movement' that affects his compositions, characterized by the illusory stretching and contracting of matter. Despite adhering to an abstract expressive code, his work therefore lends itself to a symbolic reading. The fluid modeling of the sculptural mass is in fact an image of the constant flow of time over things, of its subjecting them to processes of transformation or metamorphosis; just as the alternation of full and empty indicates the intimate coexistence, in human experience, of the material and spiritual dimensions. The complementary relationship between the terrestrial nature of the first and the feeling of elevation that corresponds to the second is also the subject of a representation of a translated type, entrusted to the horizontal development of the drapery and the vertical momentum of the form as a whole. The privileged material to give life to these poetic intentions is the statuary marble of Carrara, which the artist chooses in the Polvaccio quarry, the same used by Michelangelo. Like the Tuscan master, Atchugarry also imagines the form imprisoned in the block of matter, which is probed starting from its natural veins. In marble are also the works of the Ekilibrio Foundation - which is accompanied by a rare pictorial proof of the artist. They allow us to compare his work on the monumental scale and on the more contained one. The jagged profiles, the smoothness that lights up their surfaces with light, represent one of the sculptor's most distinguishable elements of style.