Pablo Accinelli
Onde quer que você esteja (Wherever you may be)
In Onde quer que você esteja (Wherever you may be) Pablo Accinelli sets up a row of cardboard shipping tubes of varying heights and inscribes on them in black ink the words of the title, which translates in English as “Wherever you may be.” The words, while legible, seem like fragmented lines and shapes—almost but not quite a deconstruction of the text. Accinelli explores the relationship between objects as metaphors of their own materiality and as tools for conveying ideas. Installed as a mock cityscape, they evoke the city twice over, first through their physical reference to an urban skyline, and then again through the angularity of Brazilian pixação, a kind of lettering that is strongly associated with the graffitied streets of São Paulo. The work is about the relationship between objects as metaphors of their own materiality and objects as tools for conveying ideas. Although each cylindrical form displays only one character, a scroll of paper within contains the entire phrase spelled out. The words, while legible, seem like fragmented lines and shapes—almost but not quite a deconstruction of the text. These rolled pillars form a kind of linguistic machine that contains all possibilities and potentialities of the given utterance. The system both is what it represents and contains what it represents, thereby communicating an enigmatic message: wherever you may be, this is what you are.
Pablo Accinelli is an Argentinian artist living and working in Buenos Aires. His work includes sculpture, installation, photography, and mixed media, and shows subtle influences of prominent artists of the previous generation in South America—specifically those who investigated modernity through an individual’s mental and physical relationship to constructed space. His practice merges object design, the use of industrial and everyday materials, text, and images, seeking to explore both the internal and the external relationships objects have with the spaces around them. For instance in Relación interna 2 (2010), by measuring the space between two notebook pages with a half-cylinder of concrete—a trademark modernist material—Accinelli imbues the empty spaces among and between objects with an augmented depth.