The Dirt Is the Point

The title Calm Before Game is a reasonable description of what Pipe Obando draws: a racing helmet, sealed and still, carrying the full weight of what is about to happen to its wearer. The piece is charcoal on paper, made in 2025, and it sits in a small portfolio alongside Vintage Soul, Modern Silence and Too Glam to Behave. Three works, two solo exhibitions booked in Vienna, and a practice that is, by his own account, barely two years old in any serious sense. The numbers are modest. The ambition is not.

Obando, a Colombian artist based in Neusiedl, Austria, came to drawing through design rather than fine art. He studied graphic design in Colombia starting in 2007, then moved to Milan in 2013 to study automotive design. That second education was, by his description, almost entirely about drawing. Every day, cars and car parts, rendered from observation. When I asked him about those years, speaking in Spanish over video, he said the experience was total: the entire school year was drawing, and through that repetition he began to understand the automotive form from the inside out — the way a designer sees and feels and draws a car, what it looks like from across a room being the least interesting part of that knowledge.

That distinction matters to him. There is a difference, in his view, between someone who appreciates a car's appearance and someone who has spent years learning why it looks the way it does, what decisions produced each curve. Milan gave him the second kind of understanding, and it shows in the work. The helmets and vintage racing machines he draws are forms he knows structurally, which is why he can render them in charcoal with the kind of tonal precision that makes a viewer look twice to confirm it is not a photograph.

Vintage Soul, Modern Silence, also from 2025, makes that precision visible. The title sets up a tension the image delivers on: a classic racing machine rendered with the stillness of an archive photograph, the charcoal surface holding both the weight of the object and the silence around it. Where Calm Before Game is about anticipation — the helmet closed, the race not yet begun — Vintage Soul, Modern Silence is about aftermath and memory, a machine that has already done what it was built to do. Together the two pieces work as a kind of diptych on time: before and after, speed and stillness, the human and the mechanical. The third work in the portfolio, Too Glam to Behave, pulls in a different direction — toward fashion, surface, play — and signals where the practice is heading next.

He came to charcoal relatively recently, after encountering the work of Robert Longo through a Colombian artist friend, Rodrigo Cabral. The introduction was, by his account, a door opening onto a different way of seeing. Longo's large-scale, hyper-detailed charcoal drawings of figures and objects carry a particular charge: the medium reads as raw and physical even when the image is almost photographic in its resolution. Obando recognized something in that tension. He also cites Guillermo Lorca, the Chilean painter known for his densely worked, psychologically loaded figurative canvases, as an influence absorbed through the same friendship. From Longo he took the idea that charcoal could achieve photographic resolution without losing its physical presence — that the marks could remain visible even as the image became precise. From Lorca he took permission to load a figurative image with psychological weight, to make a helmet or a mask carry more than its own form.

What he values in charcoal is its tolerance for mess. "The fact that charcoal is very rustic and very dirty, let's say, makes the work freer," he told me. "You don't worry so much about it being clean — you focus on whether the forms, the contrast, the tones are reading." He described how the medium's inherent imprecision is a quality to be used, one that lets him move between loose gestural marks and passages of near-photographic detail within the same piece. The degree of realism, he said, can be very high if you know how to handle it.

His first solo exhibition opens in August 2025 at Club U in Vienna, centred on masks and helmets. The show grew directly from the body of work he began roughly a year and a half ago, when he said he first made pieces with a clear artistic direction — a phrase he uses to distinguish that period from the earlier years of experimentation and illustration. The second exhibition, at Karl & Otto in Vienna in 2026, will focus on classic racing cars. The pairing makes sense as a sequence: the first show about the human face mediated by protective form, the second about the machine itself. Both subjects come from the same source — his years in Milan, where Formula 1 and Le Mans were things he thought about seriously, in terms of design, engineering, and the specific emotion the racing world generates. He talked about wanting to make drawings that produce a physical sensation in the viewer, something felt before it is understood, the kind of response a photograph of a race car at speed can trigger, transferred to a hand-drawn surface.

He is deliberate about his process in ways that might surprise anyone who hears him praise charcoal's freedom. When I asked whether he had left anything out of recent pieces, or made significant changes mid-work, the answer came back quickly: no. He said he always goes in with a clear idea of what he wants and how he wants it, and that he tries to be precise in his thinking from the start. The freedom charcoal allows is technical, not conceptual. He knows what he is making before he makes it.

That clarity extends to how he talks about his subjects. Helmets and masks interest him for what they do to identity: they protect and they conceal, they transform the wearer into something that is partly human and partly mechanical. He sees them as sitting at the boundary between those two states. It is a straightforward reading, and he offers it without elaboration, as if the forms speak clearly enough that extended interpretation would get in the way.

His practice is expanding, though the automotive work is staying. He described a growing interest in water, reflections, light on surfaces, and figures drawn from fashion and beauty — the territory Too Glam to Behave begins to occupy. He finds that charcoal handles those subjects well, that the medium can render a glint of light on water with the same directness it brings to the matte surface of a racing helmet. He is thinking about what people respond to, what they want to see, which is an unusual thing for an artist to say openly, and he said it without apology.

His formal credentials are thin by the standards of the contemporary art world: no prizes, no residencies, no institutional endorsements. He notes this himself in the dossier he submitted, with a matter-of-factness that reads less like humility than like a straightforward account of where he stands. What he has is a design education that required years of daily drawing, a self-directed technical education in charcoal supplemented by courses on Domestika and earlier studies in color technique and artistic illustration taken in Colombia in 2008, and a pair of solo shows in Vienna that will be the first real public test of the work.

The motorcycle mechanics course he completed at some point in his training is worth mentioning, because it tells you something about how he approaches his subjects. He wanted to understand machines from the inside — their internal structure and function, not only their exterior form. That impulse, toward structural knowledge rather than surface impression, runs through everything he describes about his practice. The charcoal, the automotive forms, the insistence on knowing what he is making before he starts: all of it points to an artist more interested in understanding than in effect.

"The automotive side will always be there," he said, "in one form or another."

Discover more of Pipe obando 's work and available pieces on their Studio profile.

View Pipe obando 's Profile