Nicolás Robbio is a young Argentine-born artist who lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil since 2001. What he does is observing everyday things: common objects, situations, and systems. Then, attentive to the limits of what is close at hand, he produces a sensitive economy of images. You can see how he does this if you go to the Pharos Centre for Contemporary Art (PCCA) in Nicosia, Cyprus, to see his Indirections solo show until January 15, 2009.
Over the past four years, one of the ways in which Robbio’s work has developed is via focused individual exhibitions and his show for the PCCA Nicosia forms a part of this sequence. Each is approached as a specific project, and becomes in itself a composite work in which previously made works are brought into a new relationship with those created in situ. Across varying media, a clear process of thought emerges. From wall drawings to the subtle placement of objects, drawings and projections, each element suggests an intimate yet indirect relationship to others, to the space that it occupies, and to the situation from which it draws.
Curator Isobel Whitelegg, a TrAIN Research Fellow, University of the Arts London, presents us with Robbio’s work and we discover that closely observed details on the objects that the artist has observed are subtracted, and outlined by drawing onto or cutting into paper and other found materials. These elements are isolated or re-combined to occupy spaces of varying scale and dimension: from individual drawings to notebooks and rooms. They are overlaid between sheets of paper or glass; constructed as new three-dimensional objects, and drawn, incised, or projected on walls.
Consistently precise, deceptively simple, this method of representation is an intricate synthesis; it brings together diagrammatic outline, illusion and the material qualities of things. The effect is to underline the interstice between reality and representation and also to see the commonplace taken apart and re-assembled from elemental parts and qualities. By careful handling, selection and re-configuration, our objects of general knowledge are re-placed as carriers of personal memory and collective meaning.
Nicolás Robbio (Mar del Plata, Argentina, 1975) graduated from the Escuela Superior de Artes Visuales Martin A. Malharro. He has been living and working in São Paulo, Brazil since 2001. In 2006 he was awarded the Rumos prize for contemporary visual art for an installation of drawings and objects entitled 'As boas intenções não são sempre as melhores' (Good intentions are not always the best).
Working individually and in collaboration with other artists, his practice extends to the production of artists books and editions, with recent commissions including a print for the Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo and a book for the forthcoming Trienal Poli/Gráfica in San Juan. His work can be found in public collections in Argentina, Brazil and the UK.