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.
It’s hard to choose one only work that represents me, especially, because every year and every time I produce something I see it as a continuation and amplification of my former ideas. That’s why; I’d rather choose a working process. This last months I’ve been working with police’s newspaper articles, with their images more specifically. I cut them out, make photocopies, enlarge them to real sizes and transfer them to paper or draw them in the wall of some exhibition room or even in the street in a “mural-graffiti” way. What I find interesting about this process is taking a certain image from the article, and making it circulate in new places. The images of famous crimes, such as María Marta García Belsunce’s face, or Nora Dalmasso’s silhouette, or a group of curious people join together in front of a dead body, are the starting point that allow me to think about an old but exiting topic: the use and reproduction of certain images. There are entire libraries written about this topic. And in this personal search, on top of creating my own esthetic (any artist challenge), I can think about every other topic that appears to everyone that walks in the street every day: sex, death, love hate… To me, everything is there when I sit to have my breakfast, and my partners bodies are offered to as my main course.
2. In general terms, how would you suggest to approach your work?
I don’t generally accept a second interpretation for my work
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?
When it comes to looking up to referents, I usually find them in cinema, literature and painting. I like Tarkoski, Leonardo Fabio, Chabrol, Ripstein, Saer, Robert Walter, Bacon and Vermeer’s purpose. I like artists that suggest, as long as it is not ambiguity. Where subtlety is not just an aesthetic concept about light and surface. I like those artists that ask themselves why, and how to show. I like the artists that considerate the existence of public.
4. Choose works or exhibitions from the last ten or fifteen years which in your opinion were very significant and explain why
I was born in the early eighty’s and I started visiting exhibitions in the middle ninety’s, I can’t mention anything but exhibitions from the last ten years, and it would be a sin to considerate the best, the ones I mention. Without the intention to rank them, I remember the German video art retrospective at Malba (Museum of Latin American art in Buenos Aires), Victor Grippo’s retrospective, Leandro Erlich’s show at Ruth Benzacar gallery, Soto at PROA Foundation. I believe the exhibitions I always liked the best were either individual or retrospective.
5. What tendencies or groupings from common elements do you see in argentine art of the last ten or fifteen years?
What I see, is that in the last ten years there has been a tendency of artists showing their work only in private spaces and selling. And they become professionals and very skilled in preparing books and administrating contacts.
Other artists create alternative spaces to be recognized by other official or private ones.
Other artists that call themselves artists.
Other artists that only work on their production and then think where they can make it circulate.
Other artists who go abroad to get formation and so they will be recognized once they come back.
Other artists that generate and sustain own exhibition spaces.
Artists that became curators that show their own work in the exhibitions the curate.
Artists in general that do things in general.
Professional artists.
And people that finishes their Fine Arts career
…
But above everything, I believe we can separate in artists who work, and the ones who don’t.
