La pinacoteca de los pobres [The Gallery of the Poor]

Ever since Pombo launched his artistic career in the late 1980s, he has challenged the description of his work as kitsch. In his view, kitsch in art is about ironic intention, and his work is without irony. It emerges instead from the places he has lived and worked, which are places he loves. He revels, for example, in the colorful, brash popular taste that thrives in the poorer parts of Buenos Aires where he worked as a young adult. La pinacoteca de los pobres, with its extravagant ornamentation and bold color combinations, celebrates the “low brow.” The paintings within this painting, crowded together salon-style and hovering over an almost-empty surrealistic landscape, cannot contain their profuse decorations, which slip from the surfaces and fall like rain to accumulate on the ground. Pombo’s meticulous application of enamel paint dot by dot with chopsticks creates the illusion of a richly bejeweled surface. Pombo is considered the artist most emblematic of the “light” aesthetic that emerged in 1990s Buenos Aires. “Light” art reflected a cultural return to beauty, sensuality, and joy after years of military dictatorship. In contrast to conceptualism’s severity and the ponderousness of much painting in the 1980s, the style, as in this work, was airy and audacious.