GENEVA.- Xippas Gallery presents, for the second time in its Geneva space, an exhibition dedicated to the Franco-Argentinian artist Pablo Reinoso.

The artist first gained recognition through his monumental interventions in public spaces, both in France and abroad. For this exhibition, he takes over the gallery space with a series of works, some of them previously unseen that engage with a more intimate scale.

Through his multidisciplinary practice, Pablo Reinoso moves seamlessly between sculpture, installation, architecture, design, drawing, and painting. His work, often organized in series, explores notions of materiality, function, and space. Using a wide range of materials and media, he questions their intrinsic functions extending, transforming, and reinterpreting them in order to shift them into new aesthetic and conceptual territories.

In his latest body of work Desenmarcado, Pablo Reinoso reconfigures what we understand by “frame.”

Here, two sculpted wooden rectangles, suspended one inside the other, no longer define the boundary of an image. They do not enclose or contain. The viewer’s gaze passes through these forms without obstruction. These are hollowed-out frames, connected by flowing curves that escape, extend, and coil into space. The frame becomes structure; the void becomes material.

This gesture inscribes itself in a long artistic lineage. In the 17th century, Bernini made his figures emerge from marble, dissolving the boundary between sculpture and architecture. Baroque works still seem to break free from their niches, spilling into space, as if movement were overwhelming the material. In Reinoso’s work, this overflow is more subdued: the sculpted lines do not burst forth they infiltrate, meander, breathe. The hand-carved wood follows a logic of organic growth: no longer a fixed form, but a living formal organism under tension.

The title itself invents a verb. Desenmarcado is not simply the absence of a frame. It is the act of “un-framing,” of detaching from function. Rooted in the Latin marcare (to mark), the word also evokes the removal of a sign, a limit, or a symbolic enclosure. Reinoso is not merely altering the function of the frame he points to it as a point of departure, a ritual of detachment, almost an ethics.

This shift in the frame echoes another radical gesture: that of Lucio Fontana, who, by slashing the surface of his canvases, did not destroy the image but opened a threshold. Fontana wasn’t piercing an object; he was piercing space. Reinoso, in his own way, also carves a passage: he does not eliminate the frame, he transforms it into a place. There is no longer an image, but a visual experience embodied in air, in light, in structured void.

This is not the first time Pablo Reinoso has taken a functional object and carried it elsewhere. His benches, in the Garabatos series, twist, stretch, and veer off axis to become sculptural ribbons. One no longer knows whether to sit down or follow the curve with the eye. The series of chairs follows a similar principle: starting from a familiar object, it extends the legs, the backrest, or the seat to tip the whole into a formal and poetic logic. But here, at the entrance of the exhibition, two chairs smaller than their outdoor counterparts—will greet visitors: they are usable, if one dares to sit. They mark a threshold: both an invitation and an immediate staging of the tension between function and contemplation.

Reinoso is drawn to the object not for what it allows, but for what it suggests. Utility is not denied, but surpassed, diverted, suspended. The object then shifts into a zone of ambiguity between sculpture, furniture, and drawing.

In this shift, there is a kind of artisanal intelligence of the gesture. The material does not serve a concept: it is patiently transformed to give birth to a free form. That freedom manifests in the curves, in the overflow, in the internal tensions. In Reinoso’s work, something always escapes function to become pure movement.

Another series presented in the exhibition, Trees, seems to extend this same logic of displacement. At first glance, they appear to be miniature trees mounted on pedestals. But what looks like trunks are in fact casts of branches, molded in patinated bronze. What resembles foliage is a network of large brass curves aerial, suspended, sometimes unstable. There are no leaves, no bark, no actual growth: only separate elements, recomposed to suggest a natural silhouette that doesn’t truly exist.

These Trees do not replicate nature: they reinterpret it through a formal vocabulary. The same curves reappear here as in the Garabatos, as in Desenmarcado. Soft lines, slow elevation, suspended tension. Everything in these works seems to converge into a shared visual language: the line as a vector of energy, as a form of silent thought.

What connects all these series is less an aesthetic than an experience one of seeing and of embodiment. In his Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that vision is not limited to the eye, but engages the whole body: our gestures, our movements, our memory. In Reinoso’s work, the artwork is always an invitation to that embodied experience. His sculptures are not to be looked at as finished objects. They are to be approached, circled, visually traversed. They come to life in the time and space of the viewer.

Scale plays a crucial role here. The works are almost body-sized: neither monumental nor miniature, they stand before us like presences. They do not impose they hold.

In his writings on aesthetics, Jacques Derrida demonstrated that what surrounds an artwork, its frame, pedestal, signature, or mode of display is never neutral. These peripheral elements profoundly shape how we see. He called this the parergon.
With Desenmarcado, Reinoso turns this idea inside out: the parergon becomes the work itself. What was once the edge becomes the center. What seemed secondary becomes the subject.

But this is not a theoretical or demonstrative reversal. What Pablo Reinoso proposes is, above all, a space to be experienced. Each piece is a perceptual device, a sculptural gesture that makes the invisible visible: the curve of a movement, the impulse of a body, the thought of a void.

Pablo Reinoso invites us not to understand the object, but to inhabit the form. Not to name things too quickly, but to look at them slowly. To let frames open, lines escape, and trees transform. To let space become the work.

Pablo Reinoso (born in 1955 in Buenos Aires) is a French-Argentinian artist who has been based in Paris since 1978. His multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, installation, architecture, painting, and design a wide range of formal explorations through which he questions the nature and boundaries of each medium.

His work has been exhibited in major international institutions and art events, including the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Grassi Museum in Leipzig, the Boghossian Foundation in Brussels, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, the MUDAC in Lausanne, the CID – Centre for Innovation and Design in Grand- Hornu, the Venice Biennale, FIAC Hors-les-Murs, the Bordeaux Biennale, and AGORA at Domaine de Chambord and the Château de Versailles.

His sculptures are also present in public spaces and have been the subject of numerous site-specific public commissions, including works at the Palais de l’Élysée in Paris, on the Quai Gillet in Lyon, in Busan, South Korea, and at the Polygone Riviera in Cagnes-sur-Mer, among others.

His works are held in prominent public collections such as the MALBA and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires, the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain (France), the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, the MACRO in Rosario, and the MUSAC in León, Spain.