Pablo Echaurren

Since the beginning of his career between the end of the sixties and the early seventies, Pablo Echaurren made clear his interest in the work of Marcel Duchamp, when he produced the series of so-called quadratini or “little squares”, works based on a miniaturisation and repetition of the sign, on the mingling of highbrow and lowbrow sources, on the disconcerting interweaving of word and image.Today, at a distance of forty years, Echaurren has gone back to reflecting on Duchamp’s work, creating a new series of fifty collages dedicated to the Boîte verte (The Green Box, 1934). What emerges from them is a more cerebral and considered reinterpretation of the model than in the past, a sign of his pressing need to pick up the threads of a dialogue commenced in his youth and never interrupted; a dialogue that today has an autobiographical tone and the character of a first retrospective stocktaking of the course of his own artistic and existential development. Taking on the work of Duchamp today, Echaurren re-examines his own, personal story, the passions, idiosyncrasies and obsessions of a life spent demystifying the cult of art, viewed as a realm separate from that of existence, and the values of uniqueness and genius associated with it.