Rain or Shine
Bruno Pacheco
Rain or Shine, 2020
Despite firmly rooted in the medium of painting, sculpture and object-based work shape an essential part of Bruno Pacheco’s practice. Regardless of their sculptural autonomy, painting remains a constitutional part of these works, may it be through the process of their execution or their conceptualization, usually based on an associative chain of lived events or (art)historical references.
Rain or Shine, 2020, a wall sculpture made from a corrugated and painted zink sheet looks at the possibilities of indirect narrativity. Like with the borrowed motives from his paintings, also here, Pacheco looks at how elements such as color pallet, fragmentation, isolation, or misplacement change the meaning and the purpose of an object. Derived for Piero della Francesca’s Polyptych of the Misericordia (1444-1465) one of the earliest works of the Italian Renaissance, the work takes as its point of reference, the cape of the Madonna, which through its depiction, bears the functionality of an architectural refuge, a shelter to protect worshippers.
Piero della Francesca, Polittico della Misericordia, 1444-1465, mixed technique on wood, 273 × 330 cm | 107.48 × 129.92 in
(detail)
Loosely appropriating some of the formal aspects of the cape, also Pacheco’s sculpture provokes association of protection and shelter. Made from ordinary construction material also found in the artist’s studio, the work questions the traditional understanding of art as a precious object, characteristic for its uniqueness and originality, rendering these values obsolete. Moreover, by abstracting the motive from its initial context, enlarging and distorting it, removing some of its elements, or juxtaposing it against a new setting, Pacheco points to the impermanence of representation, where interpretation and the reading of a work are in constant flux.