Biography
Buenos Aires, October 4th, 1962
Artist and visual arts curator. Bachelor in Visual Arts (IUNA)
Founder member of El Plan group, with which he carries out video-art activities, videoperformances and aesthetical interventions in public spaces.
Awarded with a scholarship from the Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, he settles in Germany in 1996, where he lives until the end of 1999, doing numerous exhibitions, both individually as colectively. (“Künstler der Galerie” KPV Kunstforum; Köln, “KUNSTBOMBE`96” FLOTTMAN Halle, Herne, Progressiv’96. 1997. Ausstellung Forum Labor, Hochbunker/Ehrenfeld, Köln, “Reine Formsache”, Otto-Richter-Halle, Würzburg. “Neue Arbeiten”, Das Kunstforum, Köln).
Nowadays, he works with analog and digital photography, looking in the latter for the flaws and limits of low-quality technology as an aesthetic variable.
Some exhibitions: Braque Award (1991, 1994, 1995). “1265”, Casal de Catalunya. “Photographs”, Lelé de Troya, “Private Segment”, Fotoespacio del Retiro, “5 photographers”, Del Infinito Arte Gallery, “10m/s2”, Estudio Abierto Retiro—Centro, “Implicit—Explicit”, El Borde Gallery. “Intermittent images”: Contemporary Argentine Art (travelling exhibition).
From the year 2000, he works as a curator in the Centro de Exposiciones y Muestras de Arte Contemporáneo La Casona de los Olivera, belonging to the Chacra de los Remedios Cultural Complex.
He also worked as a curator in the exhibitions “Inmediate future” (along with Valeria González) and “Back-shop Art”, both taking place within the Estudio Abierto Program. He was also a guest curator in the following exhibitions: “20x20” (Praxis art gallery); “Jurassic Fugue VII” (Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences) and joint curator of “Buenos Aires Digital” (Espacio Dorrego, curated by Graciela Taquini).
Vision of art
1. Choose a work that represents you, describe it in relation to its format and materiality, its relation with time and space, its style and theme; detail its production process.
A series of 6 photographs called Room 16 (Habitación 16), shot in the 2002 in the room of a motel. Their format is 20 x 30 cm, they are analogical, 35mm, ISO 800 colour film. The light employed was the one provided by the room without additions or flash.
The series is organised in a lineal way, a temporary sequence that presents hollows and absences, image jumps. It has a beginning and a resolution where you cannot explain what has happened among those limits. A woman smoking, tidying up her hair and an undone bed. Daily attitudes in a context predestined to the erotic.
The doubt that was introduced was about my inclusion or not in the images; finally I decided to mark the most voyeuristic aspect leaving just one character as the protagonist.
The technical problem that appeared was the lack of a lens that allowed me to embrace a bigger field, and that was sorted out by using the lateral mirrors of the room and the ones on its ceiling.
2. In general terms, how would you suggest to approach your work?
In the analogical pictures it is possible to read the use of a cinematographic narrative and also that from the photo-novel.
In my digital pictures, the use of technology in its lowest resolution aims at a gaze of certain irony on the eroticism of photography, its clichés and the “amateur” condition.
I believe that one of the emergent and visible concepts of my work is the use of new devices for capturing images and to make evident the medium employed. To present “noise” and defects as fundamental parts of the image to provoke a situation of “reality voyeur”, an eroticism that appeals to the amateur and that takes a position in the everyday.
On the other hand, the work in a collective way as an integral member of The Plan (El plan) offers a reading related to history, certain ideologies and its symbols.
3. In reference to your work and your position in the national and international art fields, what tradition do you recognize yourself in? Who are your contemporary referents? What artists of previous generations are of interest to you?
I could not place myself within a single tradition since I work with different means.
My major referent does not come from the traditional artistic circuit. It is constituted by erotic photography, on occasions anonymous, which circulate on the pages of the Internet dedicated to genre, “voyeur” galleries, “amateur”, for example the images obtained with a webcam from Casey's cam site.
The artists that interest me are: Martin Kippenberger, Gerhard Richter, Nan Goldin, Nobuyoshi Araki, Tracey Moffat, Sam Taylor-Wood, and from Argentina I could mention among others Marina de Caro, Ana Gallardo, Diana Aisenberg, Tulio de Sagastizábal, Carlos Trilnick, Esteban Pastorino and Ignacio Iasparra.
4. Choose works or exhibitions from the last ten or fifteen years which in your opinion were very significant and explain why
The work of Diego Melero and Magdalena Jitrik interests me in terms of the confrontation between politics and theoretical knowledge applied to the production and the circulation of the work of art. How different stages are being articulated. In the case of Melero, departing from two-dimensional flat work and installations in the '90s, he starts, from the year 2000, to work with performance and with the interrelation between art and gymnastics. In Jitrik´s case, it is about the use of painting, the object, the diagram, towards the direct involvement of the work in places and conflictive situations in the street.
In both cases I find that the work moves across different means but holds the same position.
5. What tendencies or groupings from common elements do you see in argentine art of the last ten or fifteen years?
I believe that in the last 10 or 15 years the use of a small scale was accentuated (in opposition to the '80s), and the multiplicity of techniques and styles in the same work.
In terms of working processes, I observe a growing recurrence to sources that come from the sciences (hard or soft).
I could say that, almost in the last four years, there was a revival of painting.
There is a stronger sense of humour and irony in the art works, in opposition to art that is pretentious.
From the year 2001 onwards there was a resurgence of the so called political art and an interest on it by new generations of artists. The creation of collectives of artists and the tendency to act and to solve problems in groups and in a less individual way also became noticeable. There is a bigger sense of collaboration among colleagues.
Another tendency is that of the artists working in diverse roles such cultural producers, curators, critics, editors, etc…
