DURACIÓN INTERNA | PABLO ACCINELLI
Pablo Accinelli (Buenos Aires, 1983) is fascinated by transformations that alter the functionalities of an object: a door that becomes a table, an electronic card that turns into a key, and so on. His practice can be described as a balancing act between reality and abstraction. The object in question is denatured, its concrete functionality subverted and reshaped in favor of another, perhaps previously unthinkable.
His works require viewers to mentally engage with them, and Duración interna is the perfect example. The artwork is an installation made with five sacks filled with cement powder, arranged neatly side by side against a wall; atop the point of contact between the first and second sack sits an inflatable pillow, the kind used around the neck during train or plane journeys.
It’s an orderly composition that leads to mental disorder, a deliberately sought-after confusion by the author himself: while the eye is satisfied by the perfect arrangement of objects, the mind races frenetically from one thought to another, in a disorderly sea of considerations and doubts.
Is it perhaps a semantic deception? The form suggests something that will never be, due to the very essence of some of the materials used, but the presence of the pillow is relevant and fundamental to this composition, it invites the viewer to recline on the least comfortable bed imaginable.
This visual and functional distortion is accompanied by a conceptual reflection, similar to the ready-made, that is: where the author’s intervention in the process lies, given the banality and everyday nature of the materials employed. But this is precisely what makes it ‘an open artwork’. The juxtaposition of materials, objects with incompatible and surreal uses, creates an ironic and refined visual short-circuit that actually relegates this reflection to a marginal and non-structural one; it’s this journey, precisely facilitated by a pillow that reveals itself in its discomforting aspect, that art, if consistent and not incidental, manages to stimulate, oscillating between curiosity and doubt.
Pablo Accinelli
Duración interna, 2016
Cement powder sacks, inflatable pillow, 210 x 63 x 30 cm
Ph. Edouard Fraipont ©
02/09/2023