“Stroke, Gesture, Impulse. From Plastic Three-Dimensionality to the Surface of the Canvas.”

Personal exhibition of Pablo Damian Cristi

The journey of Pablo Damian Cristi, an Argentine artist with solid experience, is a natural one — an evolution that has led him to extend his creative vision beyond the boundaries of sculpture. This transition does not represent an abandonment of volume, but rather the search for a new spontaneity that perhaps only the painted surface can offer.
In his works, the dialogue between matter and colour becomes intense. Every mark is a trace, a vital impulse translated into a series of works where repetition is never identical yet always maintains a clear identity of its own. The stroke remains his trademark: an unmistakable imprint that always leads back to the essence of his poetics.
Pablo’s work is a constant act of self-challenge, where the canvas becomes the physical space in which the energy of his primarily sculptural gesture finds a new, vibrant freedom. It is in this way that red meets white and vice versa; they blend together in a continuous layering that tells us of the gesture of the moment, the landscape of the artist’s soul, which finds in these canvases a means of expressing and recounting his inner world.
These are works in which the energy of a living gesture explodes — one that clearly evokes action painting — and yet the canvases of this multifaceted artist carry with them an ancient quality; due perhaps to the material tone that seems to seal the instant into an eternal moment. There is an almost sacred quality to this repetitive yet ever-changing gesture, as if the artist were standing before an invisible mirror that transforms spirit into Matter — a mirror in which art does not die, but evolves: born in 2016 in the third dimension, his creativity now rests on canvas, never entirely losing its tactile nature.
Matter is still visible; it vibrates in colour that becomes relief, in protruding textures, in faces that emerge tangibly from the surface.
This is the exhibition “Stroke, Gesture, Impulse. From Plastic Three-Dimensionality to the Surface of the Canvas”, on view at the Ikonica Art Gallery in Milan — a testament to change and transformation. It does so through a series of pictorial works, and to a lesser extent sculptural ones, that speak of painterly change and perhaps of an inner transformation as well.