I´m Your Puppet

Sometimes, the joke falls a little flat, as in the series Soldiers, from the Toy Box production. They´re really nothing more than relatively crude collaged faces affixed to two-by-fours. But in a grouping a few feet away, 6 Geese, Cano´s ingenuity manifests itself in its fullest glory: With minimal modification, he takes half a dozen empty spray bottles of the sort that would contain an ordinary household cleaner and transforms them into the amazingly evocative birds of the title. Even if you knew nothing of his skill as a puppeteer, this simple work would compel you to acknowledge that Cano is a wizard.

The exhibition is dotted with a few random pieces that quietly affirm the artist´s mastery. The Violinist mentioned earlier has its partner in Piano Man (1997), which takes a ramshackle toy piano and turns it into a person by plopping an assemblage of found items on top of it. Then there´s Policeman (1999), essentially nothing more than a cylindrical metal head with a hole for a mouth that reveals a rotating red light inside and the upside-down spout from an old coffee pot as a nose.

It´s exhilarating to see so much inventive work on display in one place, just as it´s comforting to know that, as long as people discard things, Pablo Cano will never run out of raw material for his art. There's something exquisitely sneaky about found art.