No hay replay, 1989

“My work is memory and simultaneously the souvenir of this memory, as if you picked up a rock at the beach and took it home with you: that is the moment you turn it into a souvenir and memory at once.” Carlos Pazos offered this explanation in an interview from 1992. With roots in neo-dadaism and an unpolished, brut form of pop, Carlos Pazos has been a distinguished resuscitator of objects. Despite his taste for the grotesque and for irony, his way of working and being in the world is set out by nostalgia and the loss of ingenuity, as seen in the major installation presented at Metrònom in 1989, now revived in 2021 for this exhibition at MACBA. An aircraft passenger stairway leading to nowhere appears on the scene, which is conceived as a multiple composition of components that recall the artist’s Proustian passion and the idea of staged objects. Garden gnomes, horoscope machines and spiderwebs lit by discotheque mirror balls are what we are called to consider in this piece, which works like a compendium of the artist’s obsessions.