Mario Espliego

The Anglo-Saxon word statement, perversely assumed and so in vogue in recent years, incorporates one of the most uncomfortable suffixes to speak with ease of Mario Espliego’s work. Above all, if we understand this section as a way of showing (not demonstrating) publicly and critically our work process.

If we stop to observe its etymological origin of the statement, numerous words incorporate the suffix sta-. All of them allude to the immovable (static), to what is taken for granted (state), to what is subject (stake), to what sets limits and frames (stable, stadium), to what stands out and sustains the established (statue, estate).

The work of Espliego in recent years, with a tendency from / against the sculptural, emphasizes precisely this issue, the questioning from the smallest to the hegemonic constructions assumed. Where appropriate, this interest has its starting point in the problem of the “monumental” (etymologically speaking) in its relation to the preservation of memory and think of the monument as “medium” or container of social conflicts and relationships with power. His interest in this format, the monument, responds more to a strategic than formal interest in the construction of history and the formation of hegemony.

Each variation, translation and breakage of material or procedural statism configures a new staging of constructed reality. The putting in crisis, the doubt like constant of the assumed thing is precisely the way of his personal work; humbly assuming its tiny capacity and smallness to alter the smallest of the springs. His practice is more related to simple pointing, rereading, prediction or utopian prediction than with certainties.