Some artists reveal; others conceal. Pablo Boneu does both at once. Standing before his work, simply looking isn’t enough—you have to move, sharpen your gaze, and accept that what you see may not be what you thought. His pieces don’t just tell stories; they dismantle them. They question them. They treat visual perception like a machine to be taken apart, just to understand what lies inside.
Since his series Lugares Comunes (Common Places), Boneu has created works that function like perception experiments. They seem simple at first—a group of people looking at something—until hidden layers emerge and what felt obvious turns into a riddle. Mariachis? Yes. With baseball bats? Also yes. But most viewers don’t notice until someone points it out. Because they weren’t expecting it—and that changes everything.
“The gaze is not a revelation of reality, but a projection of our expectations,” Pablo tells us.
Boneu begins with the unsettling certainty that we only see what we believe we should see. The rest disappears without us noticing. And the most intriguing part is that his work doesn’t try to “say” anything—it tries to confuse. Literally. He wants the viewer to hesitate, to misunderstand, to feel uneasy. Because only from that discomfort does the need to make sense arise. And when no sense is available, we invent it.
As the Argentine artist puts it:
“Nonsense is unbearable. So we believe. Because believing—even in something absurd—consumes less energy than doubting.”
This tension between what is present and what is missing also defines his technique. His images are printed over loose strands of thread, forming a warp that becomes fully visible only when the viewer moves. The thread allows him to work as if editing a four-frame film—except one frame can remain visible while another stays hidden. It is kinetic art activated only through curiosity.
And although the conceptual framework could stand on its own, there is something deeply physical about his work. The combination of precise, meticulous craft and restrained violence—cutting thread by thread with a blade—creates a strange aesthetic tension: somewhere between beauty and rupture, serenity and collapse.
“I wanted to reveal something and hide it at the same time. For you to see it, but only if you were a little curious.”
Boneu does not want passive spectators. He wants accomplices. Because in the end, each person completes what is missing with their own story. And that may be his most powerful statement: art doesn’t live in the piece itself—it lives in the encounter. Meaning is not given; it is built.
In a world saturated with quick images and visual certainties, Pablo Boneu proposes something radical: to pause, look twice, and accept that nothing is as evident as it seems. That between one layer and the next—between thread and silence—an entire universe may be hidden.
