Little Conklin piano

At the end of the 1950s, the Peruvian artist Emilio Rodríguez Larraín returned to Europe seeking to explore the current artistic trends in the centers of modernity. In 1961 he met Marcel Duchamp, who led him to think about “managed chance” and the “ready made”, procedures that are present in most of his works. This influence is apparent, for example, in Little Conklin piano (1969), an emblematic piece in his career as a sculptor and also one of his first works in this genre. The constructive sense of the piece, that the artist projected in his detailed plans, reflects his initial training as an architect, but also a radically different conception of artistic creation. In contrast with the gestuality that has characterized his painting, Rodríguez Larraín constructs objects that, in appearance, are the product of a precise, almost mathematical, rationality. They are self-sufficient pieces, like autonomous entities, but they have a fantastic and disturbing charge (a staircase that leads to nowhere, for example) that arises from the poetics of early surrealism and his interest in the traces of certain magical.