Sofia Festa in Conversation with Artist Pabli Stein
Pabli Stein is an Argentinian artist based in Buenos Aires. Since autumn 2023, Stein has been on a residency programme in Chelsea in collaboration with Danielle Lauder, culminating in his first New York solo exhibition in this studio in November. The show showcased a wide range of artworks across different mediums, including painting, collage, video, and installation. Stein's works address the relationship between fashion, consumption, and desire.
In Argentina, he is a leading artist of his generation and due to his consistent and prolific career, he has had several shows in Europe and Latin America. He grew up in a family dedicated to manufacturing women’s clothing thus his approach to the fashion universe began alongside his early interest in painting. Throughout the years, his style remained coherent, characterised by long brushstrokes, veils, drippings, and spilling of paint in various directions. He also employs colour contrast and chromatic saturation, along with the superposition of layers of paint: “I superimpose layers of colour as if they were layers of meaning until the original figure becomes blurred and the erosion of the reference begins to reveal itself."
His paintings are often based on collages created from photographs and cut-outs from fashion magazines. When asked to describe his paintings to someone who hasn't seen them, Stein replied that they are "figurative works that sometimes extend to abstraction, and despite their formality, they are very expressive.”
Pabli Stein, 2023. Photo Courtesy: Albert Font.
Sofia Festa: What is your work about?
Pabli Stein: I work between the intersection of arts and fashion. My work explores the conflict between what is exhibited and what is hidden. It expands between painting, collage, video, and installation. Both in collage and painting, the work is heavily influenced by photographs related to fashion and advertising aesthetics. However, this iconography is in constant conflict with my painting methods, but none would exist without the other.
SF: Why do you choose painting as your principal medium?
PS: With painting, I’m able to superimpose layers of color as if they were layers of meaning until the original figure becomes blurred and the erosion of the reference begins to reveal itself. Ultimately, the initial image disappears, and the pictorial language arises almost as another character, making the veil more significant than the veiled object.
Pabli Stein, 2023. Photo Courtesy: Albert Font.
SF: How do you begin the process of planning your paintings?
PS: I usually start my creative process by making out of magazine cutouts before moving on to the canvas. I get my inspiration from fashion advertisements in magazines such as VOGUE, W Mag, The Face, LOVE, or Runaway Magazine. Using these cutouts, I create sketches and different compositions, which often end up being artworks themselves, central to my body of work. To achieve the same effect on the collages as on my paintings, I use papers with a lot of transparency and try to emulate the same "gesture" I make with the veils in the canvases. I place those papers on top of the cutout magazines, and the result is very similar. It’s like I paint with the paper in a way. I always aim to convey a sense of mystery or that there is something behind the original image that came from the fashion or advertising world.
SF: Why do you choose fashion as your primary reference?
PS: My family was dedicated to the commercialization and manufacturing of women's clothing. Thus, between the factory and the store, I witnessed the whole process of garment making, choosing materials and colors, cutting, sewing, and preparing the window display. I remember I used to draw and copy the sketches I saw throughout the workshop. Those memories made of women’s clothing, materials, and fashion magazines hugely influenced my current practice.
Pabli Stein, 2023. Photo Courtesy: Albert Font.
SF: How has video as a medium impacted your artistic practice?
PS: With video as a medium, I'm always trying to show what is behind my artistic process, exploring the same issues I used in my paintings: the appropriation of images, the collage, and the veiling. We created a sort of artistic collective along with the filmmaker Sebastian Muro. We both began to explore common points between painting and cinema, which allowed us to make various things, live performances, and short films over time. The latest one we made is Finissage, which was selected at several independent film festivals.
Pabli Stein. Entre dos Lunas (Blonde), 2023. Acrylic on canvas, 63 x 47 in. Photo Courtesy: Pabli Stein.
SF: What has been the most significant challenge you have faced or encountered as a painter?
PS: Last year, I inaugurated my first public installation, the facade of El Centro Cultural San Martin in Buenos Aires. It is a large-scale mural where I combined fashion and advertising aesthetics to address the relationship between body, consumption, and desire. "What are you looking at?" is the name of the work, and it is located at the height of that modernist building in Buenos Aires. It comprises 18 three-meter-high acrylic plates placed one next to the other, attached to the facade (a marble structure) measuring 23 meters long by 12 meters high. For months, I worked in the workshops of El Cultural San Martín, and my greatest challenge was to develop a large-scale pictorial project.
Many thanks to Pabli Stein on behalf of MADE IN BED.
To learn more about Pabli Stein, visit his website.
Sofia Festa
Contributing Writer, MADE IN BED
