Though he does not have an Italian name, Pablo Echaurren was born in 1951 in Rome, where he currently works. In the seventies, with his own gesture he knew how to interpret the dreams of the Beat generation, of pop, and underground , the ideals of liberty and political commitment. Today, after thirty years, he continues to draw sustenence from the moods and tensions of our world, our global metropolis. Echaurren draws on his own DNA cultural imprinting of the avant guarde, which consists in living art as a means for transforming life, as a magic which is not sacred and individualist even flexible and playful, linked to to sociality and the everyday life. He grew up with the myth of Dada-ism and Surrealism, and was discovered around 1970 by the critic and gallery owner Arthur Schwarz, who made his painting known in Italy and abroad.
Against the background of the latest pop-art, art of the poor, of minimalism and conceptual, in the early Seventies he discovered his own particula style, reaching out to people beyond the realms of art. From then his production developed into an emblem of meeting point of different forms, high and low, art and applied art, a projectual approach, manual and mental, typical of the workshop which can, however boast of a long tradition, from medieval and renaissance times up to futurism. From it descends an idea of artist and artifice and inventor in the entire field, indifferent to the divisions and gerarchies that restrict creativity.
His career proceeds from early watercolours and minimalist enamels to the canvases of the eighties and nineties, which recall imaginary comic strips and graffitti, suggestions of the historic avant -guarde and pop art. Up to his most recent productions, which mix cartoons with figures rooted in popular culture, ranging from the gothic and the pre-columbian. From the beginning of the nineties he dedicates himself to ceramics, adopting a South American and grotesque faence iconography, a form of mannerism, born in the Sixteenth Century with the discovery of the frescoes of the Domus Aurea. But at the same time Pablo Echaurren has published various pamphets (including The suicide of art 2001), novels on the contemporary art world (like Delight of the author, 2003; The invasion of the abstract, 2004) and developed an intense "applied" work, leaving his own mark on the covers of books (beginning with Pigs with wings),on sleeves of records and CD's, on watches and stamps in a see-saw between underground and overground. In 2004 the Comune of Rome wished to record his multiple activities, promoting an anthology exhibition of Pablo Echaurren, from the seventies to today, in the Chiostro del Bramante, designed by Fabio Benzi, Gialuca Marziani, Federica Pirani; In 2006 at the Auditorium di Roma there was another exhibition, designed by Achille Bonito Oliva, entitled, Pablo Echaurren, to the rhythm of the Ramones.
