With Pulso [Pulse], Nicolás Mastracchio⁓ has made an installation that helps the audience to sink their feet into the ground and form a bodily connection with the space around them while his artworks float freely from the ceiling. The un-framed photographs that hang in the air intermingle with very fragile mobiles: a synthetic feather fastened with coloured wire, a dry leaf hanging from a reel. Small objects such as shells, a mother of pearl pebble and threads are framed with nets or folded cards that spin gently in the breeze. The photographs are a moment of synthesis in the exhibition: two-dimensional planes that condense the three-dimensional context of the mobiles. The photographic images don’t explore something outside of themselves to conquer a third dimension; they instead concentrate the aesthetic, spatial and material relationships around them. The video, in contrast, captures the rhythm of the experience with its constant flow and especially the sound piece that accompanies it, which floods over the other pieces, keeping a beat to guide the viewer’s immersion process. The artworks thus make it possible to see the energy contained in a contemporary image: how it is formed by an accumulation of physical sensations, contexts and relationships between bodies and images.
Although the artist is continuing with previous experimentation in which he imitated the virtual space of digital imagery without using post-production tools such as Photoshop, here he shares a physical experience with the viewer. In Pulso, Mastracchio seeks to slow down one’s perception through a connection with all the senses: a fragile, subtle, transitory and thus denser connection. The project was influenced by Zen principles that the artist has been putting into practice for a couple of years, particularly through meditation. He works with the idea of nature as seen in photographs and the concepts of movement and transformation that are central to those principles. He sets out to explore the spontaneous, ephemeral configurations contained within a small cosmos of objects that were quickly organized and then photographed. These were then combined with the moving mobiles that are being presented at this exhibition for the first time.
Nicolás Mastracchio~ was born in Buenos Aires in 1983. He has attended art clinics run by Ernesto Ballesteros (2005), Leopoldo Estol (2006) and Mónica Giron (2008), took part in the Artists Programme run by the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in 2009, and was selected for the Beca Kuitca / UTDT, 2010-11. He has received several prizes and grants, including the Premio Estímulo del Museo Castagnino, Rosario, 2011; the Beca del Fondo Nacional de las Artes 2012 and a grant to take part in the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, USA in 2012. In 2013 he won the Premio Lucio Fontana for a residency in Turin, Italy and a grant from Yaddo Artist’s Residency, Saratoga, NY in 2016. He spent twelve months in Mexico City thanks to an AMEXCID grant for a creative artist’s residency. In 2017 he took part in the Headlands Center for the Arts grant, AIR, Sausalito, CA. His work has been exhibited at different public and private institutions in Argentina and overseas such as the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, 2012; the Centro Cultural Recoleta in 2007 and 2015; the Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid, 2017; Galería Pilar, Sao Paulo, 2013; the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires, 2015, 2018-19, and the MALBA, 2012. His artwork is part of collections at the Fundación Cisneros, Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros; MALBA – Fundación Costantini, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires.
