Biography
Danny was born in Córdoba, Argentina, one hot december of 1964. Leo was born in Banfield, Buenos Aires, during Mother’s day, on October, 1969.
Since its early childhood, L studied drawing and painting with a professor, at Lomas. She made him copy the pictures that appeard on “7 Días” magazine, or “National Geographic”. He painted a lot using tempera, shading in his pictures and drawings using all pencils at hand, copying the plaster replicas of still lives. At the end of each year he used to take his exams at the Chopin Institute, who was then ran by a group of sisters, all of them old maids. They would later on go for a pizza and celebrate his remarkable results. He graduated aged 14, and then there was the void.
He wandered about the streets thinking what would he become, while on secondary school. A light appeared. He entered through the door of a ceramics atélier, the Bambuco studio. For L it was a religious experience. At age 15 he was already modelling with clay and all his classmates being much older than him: it was heaven. Everyone encouraged him to continue his art studies. He was thinking on Biology, but eventually he also felt comfortable with art. Thus, he eventually entered the Pueyrredon art school at age 18 and at that very moment started working with fellow nuts like him, always older, at Medio Mundo Varieté and at a theater in the corner of Corrientes Ave. and Rodríguez Peña st. (today it’s a porn theater), doing the sceneries and some intervention on the wardrobe. He graduated from Pueyrredón school, started La Cárcova and it was there that he met Pablo Suárez, Tulio de Sagastizábal and Ahuva Slimowicz. Religious experience number 2.
A couple of years later, at an exhibition done at El Chino’s place, he met D. Falls deeply in love with that blond from Córdoba and (it is said, since they are very confidential on they private lives) they live together ever since, having three children: Santino, Doménico and Piolín. They pass their days embroidering and leading a family life.
D. had a life marked by religion. He was born and grew-up in a home of italian melancholic immigrants with their feet on mediterranean ground, but with their eyes and heart fixed in Italy. Since his childhood he was considered a special boy by the women of the house. He loved collecting his sister’s velvet and glitter picture cards, recreating himself on each one of them. When he was not playing with the picture cards, he would jump on top of the pillars of the garden and play as if he where a music singer. Early in his life he began embroidering at the Nun school he attended, sharing this activity with 30 other little girls, embroidering flowers all day long until he couldn’t, and dedicating them to his mother but later on hiding them inside his satchel that smelled leather, fearing that eventually his father would discover him and call him a faggot. He was always a good student with excellent qualifications. When he was ten, he bought his first art book, on Van Gogh. Without knowing why, an indeterminate fear took over him and paralyzed him. He was never able to paint again, thinking his ears might fall, or he would go insane. That was a recurrent thought for many years, leaving him perplexed just by smelling the oils. It is said that, not so long ago, when he sold several paintings of his, that he had done along with L, he dreamt again that he was being locked in a mental institution. He wandered about the studios of the art school he attended and the ateliers of those he considered to be his masters: Teresa Lascano and Sergio Bazán. He often recalls that his liberation took place at a psychiatrist divan, and that being far away from his cordobese loved-ones set him free of such a pressure, and that it was then that he happily turn himself to painting again.
D. is invited to the exhibition at el Chino’s place and before it ended he discovered himself with his arms around a dark-haired boy. He wanted to know more about him, but this brave young man from Buenos Aires dissapeared with the moon. It is said it was hard work to conquer him. The brave dark-haired boy, on the contrary, alleges the opposite: having fallen completely in love from the word go.
Truth is that the images of one started arousing in the work of the other one and viceversa.
D. went back to his embroideries and flowers and arabesques covered L’s perfectly delineated figures. It seems as if with the strategy of taken over one another, like Narcissus, they started out portraying each other in the sceneries of their lives; this one and the other ones.
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.
There are several ways of looking or works that seduce me. I will speak of one of Schiavoni. It is entitled My Sister (Mi hermana), and I saw it by chance in the Castagnino Museum (Museo Castagnino) in the director's office. It is from 1927, it is a portrait of his sister María Laura, with a fox stole; it is painted with oil on a canvas. What I find engaging about this work (and of others too) is to notice and to write down the smallest circumstances of reality, that are elaborated and worked out with a charm that is difficult to reach. I am fascinated by the degree of obsession in the realization and the ridiculous importance he gives to that stole. It traps me when the details and the attention go off on tangents; to other places. I do not know if it is a mistake (to walk on other paths), but I like to think that it is. For that reason I prefer mistakes, what is politically incorrect; where I find that the creative fact is manifested in an accurate and true way. Like screaming “out with those speeches that are so certain about themselves!” Here we are, to produce work without knowing where we are going…
I also want to name other ways of looking. That is: Tarsila, The Customs´ officer Rousseau, The Costus, Bruce La Bruce, James Bidgood, the Indian huicholes, John Galliano, 8 Women, Honcho, several directors of Björk´s videos.
2. In general terms, how would you suggest to approach your work?
What appears in my production, particularly in these last years, is this path of ideas on which I like to go through, stony at many times, not very comfortable at others. But certainly, much more pleasant for my spirit and my intellect. Already for two years I have made works that are done together with Daniel Giannone, where we place ourselves in situations, we cross-dress into Chinese, samurais, or in Argentinean figure heads. We share the same roof. We feed our animals 3. We receive our friends. We embroider together. And we could transit time in a different way, a time with no hurry. A time with no limits, like a time of meditation.
In this way we connect with a patient work, rescuing handmade work, the crafts. We returned to our own sources. Vivi Usubiaga describes it with great assertion: “... The chosen technique is not capricious, its ritual procedures keep a significant libidinal charge. They condense the softness of the patient work –like the writing of a caress - with the violence of multiple stabs that rip to leave traces. It is the eroticism about painting with needles. The cloth bleeds textile colours that are modulated with scissors. The delicacy of the results contrasts with the meticulous roughness that is printed on the skin of the executors. Such as in a passionate act, a healing time is needed to erase from the body the traces of the tools…”4
I believe that my work, which now is also ours, demands the loosening of the gaze, to forget prejudices, and to put tolerance into practice.
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?
The artists I am interested in, that I feel that something of my universe is shared with theirs or that I would like something to be shared with (and this is what a “referent” is for me), could be Schiavoni, M. Pombo, P. Suárez, D. Leavitt, N. Kidman.
Humility and sophistication. A good combination for having a little of glamour.
They interest me, those already named and also: A. Passolini, C. Schiavi, J. Gumier Maier, R. Vitali, E. Bairon, V. Maculan, M. Burton, T. Burton, P. Almodóvar, D&G, P. McCarthy, A. Goldestein, Madonna, Grace Jones, Björk, M. Di Giorgio, W. Wilder, the Chapman, R. Mapplethorpe, Gilbert & George.
4. Choose works or exhibitions from the last ten or fifteen years which in your opinion were very significant and explain why
I do not know if I can think of works or exhibitions that are that significant, I find it too pretentious for my mind. I will tell about some works or exhibitions that have touched me, that awoke in me that side that I find pleasant (like the memory of the smell of the wetted earth after a rain in Chascomús).
Dark Room, by R. Jacoby (Beauty and Happiness, Belleza y Felicidad), of this show I remember my impatience to go down to the room and to look through the camera, and to discover what I could. I love the capacity of R. J. to constantly innovate and mobilise things.
Paralyzed Fantasies (Fantasías paralizadas), A. Passolini (Rojas C.C.), Passolini carried out a series of drawings where he described the moving sequence of the objects of a house. In particular, I remember the sequence from a stylish chair that stretches itself and gets ready to be dressed up, with hair curlers. This drawing series finished with a golden clip: the object of the chair, on a natural scale, painting its fingernails.
The last exhibition of R. Vitali in Ruth Benzacar, with his objects with sewn bids; two pieces of Román caught my attention, the pink panther that was on the wall and the suit (both pieces, haut couture) of blue bids and magnifying glasses. I would have them at home and I could live pleasantly with them.
That show of Mexican crafts in the Museum F. Blanco. I can say very little of this marvel, just that I am happy I have seen it.
There are no words to describe the emotion of having been there.
A common element of these shows is the freshness of their ideas and their excellent craftsmanship.
5. What tendencies or groupings from common elements do you see in argentine art of the last ten or fifteen years?
A tendency to rescue the handmade and craft-like aspects of the production, which is a fundamental part to this concept.
Another one, related to the technological aspect, where the tool becomes a fundamental aspect. Digital productions, using the computer as a platform.
A trashy international tendency, taken from little art magazine pictures.
After the economic and social crisis of the year 2000, the opportunistic socio-political tendency. A lot of protests, much poverty… works produced with materials that could feed several families…
After the year 2000, there are also several artists´ groups working with the excluded sectors, in group, that I find a praiseworthy task. (TPS, Eloísa Cartonera).
I believe that all art is political, beautifully political. A megaphone where the words do not talk, it is the images that talk.
1) Augusto Schiavoni, Rubén Echagüe, UNR, Dirección de Publicaciones UNR, 1989.
2) Danny is a visual artist and my partner.
3) Hilario, Domenico and Santino.
4) Duet, “On threads, love at first sight, flowers and love caprices” (Duetto, Sobre hilos, flechazos, flores y caprichos del amor), Viviana Usubiaga, Catalogue, 2004.