Pablo Echaurren's 'Il mio Baruchello' Explores Artistic Mentorship and Irreverence

Pablo Echaurren's new book 'Il mio Baruchello,' published by Mauvais Livres in Rome in 2025, is a public confession of his artistic and personal debt to Gianfranco Baruchello. The volume features a preface by Valerio Magrelli and closes with a 2010 text by Antonio Pennacchi. Echaurren describes himself as a misfit, a 'neandethalian' who felt inadequate and was adopted as a moral ward by Baruchello. The book functions as an errata corrige for a life that deviated from normal biographical sequence. Arturo Schwarz recalls Echaurren as a long-haired, rebellious youth who loved Tristan Tzara and André Breton. The text explores Baruchello's own lineage from Marcel Duchamp, who praised Baruchello's large white paintings in a 1966 interview. Echaurren outlines the 'Baruchello protocol' for artistic formation: appropriation of newspaper clippings and fragments, selection of 'objects of affection' placed on an empty page, and direct ink drawing without pencil sketches to embrace error. The book is structured like a collage, using parataxis rather than hierarchy, and is described as an introduction to irreverence. It references a wide network of figures including Toti Scialoja, Cy Twombly, Italo Calvino, Nanni Balestrini, Jannis Kounellis, and Emilio Villa, as well as the political group Lotta Continua and the Indiani Metropolitani. The book costs €23 and spans 176 pages.