The Tap, 1988

Two of his polychrome plaster sculptures –The tap and Ars 88– are showcased at the exhibition Más allá del objeto (“Beyond Objects”), organised by Artinf magazine at the Sala Forum of the Patio Bullrich shopping centre in Buenos Aires. Made the previous year, both pieces, as others of the period, bear the word “Ars” in relief motifs. They vindicate and pay homage to the artist’s work and the creative transformation of matter that artistic labours demand. The Tap displays a complex mechanism –halfway between retort and mechanical filter– in which the raw material, hatching from a sort of egg, seems to be distilled through an alchemical process, until it reaches  its essence in the manifestation of the artistic object. Thus it embodies and makes visible the characteristic ideas and tropisms of the spiritual world, which flows down the tap and into a pipe that distributes it, as it would “tap water”, to satiate people’s thirst for it. On the cornice there is a small frog representing fertility, its amphibious nature linking water and earth, creation and resurrection. Also, because of its anatomical resemblance to the human being, the frog is considered a