Biography
I was born in Córdoba in 1973, When I finished highschool I entered the Arts School of the UNC, from where I graduated in 1999 as a Bachelor in Painting. I participated in several art salons in the city of Córdoba. In 1999 I got the 2nd prize at the “Salón Pro-Arte Córdoba”, done at the Museo Caraffa, and in 2000 I took part of the 4th edition of the Constantini awards at the MNBA, in Buenos Aires. In 2001 I moved to New York, where I stayed for a year and worked as a cartoonist. Since 2002 I live and work as an artist in Mexico. In Mexico City I’ve exhibited my work at the MUCA (Universitary Museum of Contemporary Art), the FEMACO (Mexican Fair of Contemporary Art), and I’m currently in touch with T20, a gallery of contemporary art located in Murcia, Spain.
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.
An object that worked as a ‘huge music box’ and at the same time was a tribute to that jewish little girl who was killed by the Nazis during WWII. There are several symbolic and descriptive elements interacting in this work, referring to things like brutality, innocence and the terror of being discovered. In order to do this work, I built a huge music box and inserted electric and musical mechanisms to it, adding elements that were representative of the above-mentioned character; i decorated and intervened the woodbox so as to finally turn it into a music box.
2. In general terms, how would you suggest to approach your work?
I tend to believe that my work is easy to read, and generally refers to certain moods, or emotional states of mind. I don’t consider myself a difficult or sophisticated artist, and I think my work has to be perceived in relation to what it might get to suggest. I don’t usually work on a specific theme. I like painting and what it generates by means of its colours, gestures and traces, even my work being figurative as it is. I think that painting is a language in itself, and does not need a theme or discourse to go with it, no matter if such a discourse is political, social or of any other kind.
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 find it difficult to insert myself on a particular tradition or artistic line, since the art scene, from the 1950s to these days, has branched out into an endless amount of tendencies and styles that interlace and coexist into extremely diverse fields and areas. I can go from the painting to an object or an installation, whenever I think that a particular language is better than others to express a certain idea.
Of all contemporary painters that have interested me from the 1990s on, I can name some like Manuel Ocampo, or the Clayton brothers, and other contemporary artists that were also an influence to me, prior to the 1990s, like Enzo Cucchi, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Julio Galán, Carlos Alonso, Antonio Berni.
4. Choose works or exhibitions from the last ten or fifteen years which in your opinion were very significant and explain why
I can’t recall any particular work of art particulary significant to me. I haven’t lived in Argentina for while now, and back when I was a student (besides not being able to see many important exibitions while living in Córdoba), I think I wasn’t artistically mature enough so as to value works that, through the years, have taken another dimension in my life and work.
On the contrary, I have seen abroad works from artists that have turned to be extremelly significant to me at particular moments of my life, like when back in NY I saw a performance by Paul McCarthy. I haven’t ever seen an artist like him before, and though I’m not a performance artist, somehow I’ve found a certain grotesque, absurd and shocking language in his work with which I try to impregnate my own paintings.
