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Summer Kisses

Pello Irazu

1992

Synthetic enamel on wood

Dimensions: 92 x 87.5 x 75.5 cm

Reference: ACF0274

Print sheet

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One of the recurring themes in Pello Irazu’s work is “the box, the container, something that contains something else,” as he told Xabier Sáenz de Gorbea in an interview in 1987. “I tried to make the external form of the object respond to an internal, not formal, structure, to avoid the theme being the recipient, its inner void and that kind of metaphysics, but rather something else. […] To bring out the complexity of the simple, the minimal. That complexity is never totally revealed; it is the dark side of things, the mysterious part they may have. I began to make the external image of the objects a problem, to think that the structure doesn’t only respond to something formal, but that there is something more.” That process was to reach its climax in some of the pieces done by Irazu while he was in New York. The central element of Summer Kisses may refer to a table in a corner of a room—with any sentimental and biographical implications or personal reminiscences one might imagine—or take to the limit Christian Leigh’s assertion about the sculptor when he says that “his is a sculpture of the inside and the outside.” It looks as if the interior is vanishing from the perimeter of the cube in stripes of colour like the ones that cover the outside of the object. But at the same time the spectator is given an opportunity to enter the sculpture, to walk around it, one might say, so that both content and container are taken inside the gaze. Interior and exterior blend in a perverse game, only broken by the playful, amusing mood of the colours he uses. Colours, moreover, that are not industrial, but hand-mixed and hand-painted.

Mariano Navarro