Resonancia magnética
Baró Galeria
Pablo Siquier
November - March 2026
“To what erotics of knowledge is linked the ecstasy of reading such a cosmos? As I enjoy it violently, I wonder where the pleasure of ‘seeing the whole,’ of mastering, of totalizing the most immense of human texts originates.” — Michel de Certeau, Walking in the city. Walking in the City
When Michel de Certeau speaks of “the most immense of human texts,” he is referring to the city: a polyphonic text, permanently in the making. From the new building rising floor by floor to the urban drifter, passing by the monument that has been removed, urban reality appears as a shifting cosmos shaped by innumerable forces.
In his first exhibition in Mallorca, Pablo Siquier (Buenos Aires, 1961) presents a new series of monochromatic works that move from black to rust tones. Composed of lines, planes, and grids that do not allude to any specific city, they condense the urban pulse. These works do not represent the city; rather, they envision it, conceiving it as a system of resonances.
Another fundamental aspect is the connection between brain and hand, a relationship that has been widely explored in philosophy and aesthetics. In Siquier’s paintings, digital precision and manual gesture coexist within the same process. Etymologically, the word digital shares its root with digitus—the Latin for “finger.” Far from being opposites, the digital and the manual form a continuum. In this dialogue between technology and gesture, thought becomes material, and painting becomes an extension of the body that reasons, perceives, and traverses the city.
Here, the artist positions himself as a commentator on the city, which for him constitutes “the ultimate work of contemporary culture.” A fabric of signs, flows, and events where any totalizing gaze proves impossible. In other words, the city cannot be read as a whole; it can only be inhabited and traversed in fragments, creating a mental map that differs for each individual.
In Walking in the City, Michel de Certeau describes precisely this tension between the desire to see the whole and the impossibility of doing so. From above, the gaze seeks to possess totality, but what it achieves is only an illusion of control:
“The desire to see the city preceded the means of satisfying it. Medieval or Renaissance paintings represented the city in perspective through an eye that, however, had never before existed. They simultaneously invented the flight over the city and the panorama it made possible. This fiction already transformed the medieval spectator into a celestial eye. It made gods.”
Far from making gods, Siquier works precisely on that friction between the desire for order and the impossibility of a panoptic vision. The result is a series of maps of an unattainable territory, cartographies without geography, where the rational impulse of form coexists with its progressive dissolution. In this sense, his painting functions as a machine of abstraction, heir to Latin American modernism and to twentieth-century urban thought, yet displaced toward a critical dimension: the questioning of the modern gaze and its claim to control. As Néstor García Canclini suggests in his reflection on urban imaginaries, the contemporary city is articulated as a hybrid space, traversed by tensions between order and disorder, planning and desire.
Buenos Aires, where the artist lives and works, appears as the sensitive matrix of this reflection. Its layout—at once rigorous and chaotic—unfolds in Siquier’s canvases as a system striving for order, yet whose internal logic constantly overflows. In this gesture, abstraction becomes territory, and painting, a form of experiential knowledge, like the act of drifting through the city.
Esmeralda Gómez Galera