THE AESTHETIC TRANSFORMATION OF FUNCTIONALITY: REINOSO AT MNAD

The Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas (MNAD) hosts La vida se mueve (Life Moves), the first solo exhibition in Madrid dedicated to Pablo Reinoso (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1955). Curated by José Jiménez, the exhibition offers a broad and significant overview of the artist’s work, especially highlighting his interdisciplinary practice between art and design.

Through the display of singular pieces that reflect some of the Franco-Argentine’s fundamental aesthetic lines, the exhibition invites almost semiotic observation of objects that have been stripped of their original function through conceptual manipulation.

From the perspective of decorative arts, the exhibition allows viewers to trace the exploration and results of distancing objects from practicality, transforming this movement into a creative engine. The interplay of lines, solids, and voids becomes the backbone of a poetic practice that connects the artist’s vision with the museum’s mission, emphasized by the creation of specific works for this occasion, always imbued with dynamic energy.

The use of furniture and tools is combined with forms and certain physical planes, such as the aesthetic functionality of air, opening a spectrum of conceptual and material possibilities. That is, furniture that overflows in its uselessness, transformed tools, and objects stripped of any practical use highlight this prerogative of the decorative.

The spaghetti chairs and benches, wooden structures that come to life in their expansion and resonate with echoes of surrealism, anchor this vision alongside the respirantes, installations that invite reflection on corporeal fragility from an existential perspective. The Incendios installation, with wooden forms transformed into flames, engages in this encounter with the impossible.

Pablo Reinoso. La vida se mueve can be seen until March 15 at the Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Montalbán 12, Madrid, Spain.