Dialogues #1. Marcelo Pombo and Martín Legón
03.09.2015 Buenos Aires, August 2015
ML: Well, as I was saying, I was looking forward to interviewing you, particularly as the gallery is conducive to talk…
MP: What do you want to talk about? Barro?
ML: I wanted to ask you a few things, seeing as you had two exhibitions on at the same time.
MP: Fine. Fire away!
ML: I don’t know whether you heard comments from artists about the exhibition that ended a few days ago at the Colección Fortabat. Many saw it as a change of paradigm. It was an important moment for all of us who visited to be able to see your retrospective. So above all else I wanted to know how you feel seeing your work in perspective.
MP: Fine. I think that exhibition changed my life in the sense that people in the art world were able to see the work I’ve done over thirty years, and the feedback I’ve received is very gratifying. And the work with Inés Katzenstein was a stroke of luck, not only for everything she brought to it but also because I accepted each and every one of her decisions. It wasn’t in my plans to do a retrospective exhibition almost as the same time as an exhibition of my recent works in a gallery. They overlapped completely by chance. In the Colección Fortabat I’m free to choose the curator and propose Inés if she wants. And as I said, I totally abide by her wishes and preferences.
ML: That’s clear.
MP: And it’s what I suffered most early on… because in the mid-90s I was doing many pieces of work with a unique character, not series. Series weren’t of any interest to me. I preferred experimenting with techniques, modest experiments, little formats, pictures that were sellable, but I was always seeking to experiment. I wanted them to be unique. And during the 90s people didn’t think much of that. Galleries or institutions wanted series, the exploration of things that were similar to each other, and I was doing things that were really exceptional in comparison with each other. I experienced it as someone who wanted to entertain, as if they were magic tricks by a bad magician. So a retrospective like this one was a chance for me to show all my tricks and games… Download full dialogue
