The classics in the garden
The vast majority of people are aware of the sculptures through the public monuments, foot or horseback riding, busts and sometimes naked people heroes, and also warns its existence by semi-public objects in private spaces: the garden gnomes.
This work is the first intervention in the Museum of Calques Ernesto de la Cárcova, made especially in relation to the collection and its history and what it represents to the public. It consists of a series of pieces of plaster and ceramics (mixture of garden gnomes and papanoeles) which mockingly imitate the poses of rubbings of the collection, like David, Moses, Venus de Milo, among many others, with a character between funny and grotesque, fantastic, a little deformed, something between a nightmare of Goya and a Goblin of Villa Gesell. To make them, I installed me in a workshop of the Museum for approximately three months, leading furniture of garden and home to Internet for making my stay there easier. The following page contains some details and a fragment of the text that accompanied the exhibition.

Excerpt from the catalogue of the exhibition at Museo de Calcos Ernesto de la Cárcova, Buenos Aires, 2015, by Andrés Duprat, curator of the show.

With his work, Esteban Álvarez proposes another form of dialogue with the space of the Museum of rubbings. Artist recovers an iconic classroom of what was the National School of fine arts, Ernesto de la Cárcova, today Museum of casts, and installed a workshop production of sculptures there during the period of exhibition.
His proposal focuses on the artistic practice across the idea of a closed work, incorporating the process, development and time as a variable capital of his work.
The sculptures, inspired by the domestic and familiar universe of the garden gnomes, versionarán great works of universal history, such as the Venus de Milo or Rodin’s thinker, generating a counterpoint between the concept of high culture and popular culture. Also, the fact of dealing with an institutional classroom for a few months and used as a private workshop, which will produce a series of works from home features will be installed in the garden of the Museum, proposes a reflection on the use of public and private space.
The dynamics of his action will be that the garden of the Museum go populating from an army of small grotesque creatures that copied with impunity the poses of the sculptures from the Museum‘s collection. With the passing of the days these bizarre characters will multiply and iran approaching the rooms creating an “unacceptable” siege of the domestic art to the great works of world art, as if they pugnaran to be also part of this idealized universe.
Andrés Duprat, 2015.