Pablo Butteri feels a visceral link with nature. His works are organic and full of movement, with abstract beings emerging from labyrinths and knots. Salt, coal, glass, and silicone create enigmatic and enchanting, quasi-monochrome micro-worlds that invite viewers to follow unclear passages through dense spaces amid smoke and audiovisual projections. A university professor, with a painting degree from the Prilidiano Pueyrredón National School of Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Visual Arts from UNA in Buenos Aires, the Argentinian artist courts uncertainty in his sculptures, paintings, drawings, site-specific works, and video installations, seeking to balance order and chaos through an intimated but never evident figuration.
María Carolina Baulo: Although your work may begin in painting, it quickly takes over space. Two-dimensional landscapes unfold into creatures and bio-systems that appear in the “Organisms” series (“Organismos,” 2018–19), works that re-think humanity’s links to nature. How did you begin to realize these concepts in formal terms?
Pablo Butteri: When I began to work on the paintings, I was thinking of generating an obsessive game of knots and ties, creating wefts that were like the constant crossing of cause-and-effect variables in an artificial world with continuously changing links . . .
. . . Subscribe to print and/or digital editions of Sculpture to read the full article.
