artnexus #80

In the course of his career, Darío Escobar (Guatemala, 1971) has developed a unique relationship with the culture of his country and with the art of sculpture. From the beginning, his interest in thinking from the perspective presented by the objects he found—as his work is inscribed in an open search for ready-mades— allowed him to combine elements of the most clearly identifiable consumer society with the vast and rich world of Guatemalan handcrafts. McDonald’s cups and skateboards richly worked in the local metal working tradition were the basic devices he used to propose sculptural objects that brought together components taken from consumer society and ancestral cultural legacies, two resources that are connected here only to be transgressed. Escobar’s desire to work with such varied consumer objects, from food to sports—all of them now internationalized—makes it possible for him to ironize about their implications.

An obvious admirer of Jean Baudrillard and his theories of simulacra, Escobar constructs alternative meanings for our everyday objects, revealing the presence of the disposable and the immediate as two key components of contemporary culture. The main concept of “not remaining” shown in his works breaks with a traditional understanding of sculpture as an object intended to endure both in terms of time and of the space that contains it. 

By appealing to the memory of his materials and cultural traditions, and by proposing particular relationships with common objects, Escobar prompts the observers of his works to reconsider the meaning of the objects that surround us in our everyday life.

IVONNE PINI