Moving through artisanal visualities, discarded materials and human-animal figures, Marcelo Pombo’s practice displays a tactile and visual repertoire that sculpts its own world and opens up the possibility of multiplying the present. The exhibition, Marcelo Pombo: starting point of artisanal conceptualism at the Barro Gallery in New York, brings together works from the artist’s early career in the 1980s to the present day, including a series of pencil and mixed media drawings, and works made with found objects.
“Cortinita (small curtain)” (1993), in polyester and nylon fabric with green and blue plastic appliqués, hangs at the back of the main room. By his side, “Mosquitero (Mosquito Net)” (1990) made of metallic fabric and interwoven with faux pearls, also follows Pombo’s exploration of found and disposable objects. Affection and beauty, but also fragility and impermanence, are linked in the careful fabrication of these works. Created during the global rise of neoliberalism in the 1990s, these pieces embellish and praise mundane, discarded objects. This gesture resonates with current feminist movements in Latin America that emphasize the importance of undervalued care practices in capitalist logic.
The trace of the woven movements follows all around the space. A group of five mixed-media drawings, made between the years 2022 and 2023, depict threads that alternate between string paths and loose waves. In two of Untitled designs, fabric wefts, patches and colored threads adopt hand-shaped ends. These complex and intriguing designs transform threads and needles into active living organisms, but also protesters.
The pencil works included in Drawings from São Paulo contextualize the artist’s experience in São Paulo in the early 1980s, where he was involved in gay rights activism. In the exhibition catalogPombo describes this experience as key to his “identification with sexual diversity and the counterculture.” This series depicts layered scenes of pleasure, pain, sex and eroticism, with grotesque, monstrous, abject, human-animal characters and Disneyland sparkles. Paradisiac, but sometimes anchored in natural and urban scenarios that resemble reality, the drawings trigger imaginations for other worlds and move the body towards metamorphic entities.
Working at the boundary between craft and art, hand and needle, bodies and metamorphosis, Pombo’s work sculpts alternative ways of being and interrelationships. As the living fabric that weaves itself may suggest, these unmissable united works advocate the language of everyday things and the stories of the forgotten.
Artisanal Conceptualism: Starting Point continues at Barro New York (25 Peck Slip, Seaport, Manhattan) through May 20. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
