The exhibition offers a series of works created over forty years in which Pablo Echaurren dialogues with the shadow of the father of conceptual art Marcel Duchamp.
Inspired by Duchamp's work Nu descendant un escalier, the artist has conceived a series of signs inviting the viewer, with an onomatopoeic play on words, to climb the stairs (Nous ascendants un escalier) and then to descend them (Nous descendants an escalier).
The exhibition is also a journey through distant/near and imagined/lived time that connects three dates: 1917, 1977 and 2017.
1917: the year in which Duchamp presents the ready-made Fountain, the provocative work par excellence.
1977: having abandoned the profession of artist for some time, Echaurren, linking himself to the ironic and creative current of the so-called metropolitan Indians, elaborates with the group a new collective language based on the use of Duchamp's provocations but in a political key, creating fanzines, drawings, collages and creating surprise happenings.
2017: the artist decides to recover the materials related to those moments, notebooks, written and drawn notes, also proposing new works that highlight the possibility of using Duchamp still today as a palimpsest on which to trace a personal journey.
The fulcrum of the exhibition is represented by a series of collages that collide with the paper materials of the “boîte verte”, the Duchampian box entitled La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (1934). A work that represents for Echaurren not only a personal object of affection but also a stimulus and food for thought on making art as a practice linked to the dimension of thought.
As is well known, the box contains the reproduction of notes, photos, drawings and torn sheets relating to the elaboration of the Great Glass. A sort of toolbox but also a potential collage. Echaurren, who has practiced the collage route alongside other artistic disciplines since 1969, has used copies of the facsimiles of the "boîte" to create fifty works in an ideal game of chess with the great master. In order to underline its importance, an original example of the box is physically present in the exhibition.
At the end of the itinerary, the ceramic sculpture U/we are all Duchamp, a copy of the historic urinal signed R. Mutt, on which Echaurren intervened by applying a sort of tattoo made with a technique taken from the compendium of the sixteenth-century Faenza grotesque, thus transforming the object in an alienating piece of furniture through a détournement poised between the Middle Ages, graffiti, past and present, high and low.
Venice, Scala Contarini del Bovolo, S. Marco 4299
Ph:Pablo Echaurren, U/we are all Duchamp 2, 2016, majolica sculpture in berettino, blue monochrome grotesque decoration with highlights, h. 40, the. 66, p. 53cm
