Biography
He was born in Mar del Plata in 1966 and currently works in Buenos Aires.
He settles in Buenos Aires and it is between 1997-1999 that he takes part in the scholarship program for young artists directed by Guillermo Kuitca. He exhibits individually at the Alliance Française (Buenos Aires, 1998), Fundación Proa (Buenos Aires, 1999), Belleza y Felicidad art gallery (Buenos Aires, 2000) and Dabbah Torrejón art gallery (Buenos Aires, 2001), where he presents his exhibition “Geografía”. From 1996 he participates in a number of collective exhibitions and in 1998 he obtains the 1st prize at the Bahía Blanca National Biennial of Art, Argentina. In 2002 obtains the scholarship of the National Arts Fund and the grant to creation of the Fundación Antorchas.
In 2003 he presents his exhibition “Relevamientos” at the Cervantes Institute of the John Hancock Center, in Chicago. He recibes the “Artista Iniciación” award, given by the Argentina Art Critics Association in relation to his exhibition “Hormigas, arañas y abejas (Ants, spiders and bees)”, exhibited at the Centro Cultural Borges in 2004. In June 2005 he presents his installation “Sonidos Distantes”, at Dabbah Torrejón art gallery, in Buenos Aires.
The modesty of the materials he uses, which he so carefully manipulates —in many cases, barely altered by the gesture, gain a new entity by means of the meticulous arrangement to which they are subject, in order to obtain rigorous compositions where nothing seems to be trusted to chance. He ranks his papers and woods through a subtle strategy of duchampean origin.
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.
One of my pieces consists of a small irregular magnet suspended from a nail in the wall. This magnet is acting all the time, exercising its action on the nail. For this piece of magnet to remain suspended from the wall, it needs that nail and the nail needs the wall. Another work consists of two wooden glasses with sugar on two low, tear-shaped tables made of wood and glass. This piece began as of the drawing of the glasses that contained, the one, black sugar, the other blonde sugar. The glasses needed some kind of support to be exhibited; I had thought of a support in the style of a piece of furniture that could contain them, otherwise I could mount them on a classic support, a kind of base to present them. When I got the wooden glasses and the sugar, I went out to search for bases as yet another material. It took me quite a while to find them, but when it happened there was no doubt that those tables were the right ones (and that the glasses turned the tables into the artwork as well and not just support) and that that was the work’s starting point, in that way it could continue onto the floor, the room, the building, the city, etc., which those glasses needed. This point of a chain reaction is what I am interested in making happen with the installations I carry out.
2. In general terms, how would you suggest to approach your work?
I work with the recollection of objects ad materials that I store, select and arrange in installations; in this respect I do not follow a fixed pattern, order or system of rules, and in the moment of presenting them, that configuration between them transforms them. I believe this is a legible concept within my production and in the process it has to do with what I mentioned earlier about the chain reaction that my work awakens. By and large my installations require a paused time from the observer. I am interested in associating the act of transformation with magic, I could say that I know what actions I did or did not for this to occur but I sometimes feel that a magic trick that I do not know occurs. Something escapes me, and when this magic trick occurs, I see speed, a fleeting action.
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?
Ready-mades, povera and object-art are traditions I am interested in – taking advantage of any kind of material, any raw material or prefabricated article, pre-existing materials which in the configurative process acquire a new associative dimension – but I seem to recognise myself in this line of work alone.
4. Choose works or exhibitions from the last ten or fifteen years which in your opinion were very significant and explain why
Some of my referents and/or artists that interest me are: Richard Tuttle, Agnes Martin, Sarah Sze, Waltercio Caldas, Jac Leirner, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Lygia Clark, Cildo Meireles, Mira Schendel, Carmelo Arden Quin, Hélio Oiticica, Sandra Cinto, Raymond Pettibon, Gabriel Orozco, Víctor Grippo, Guillermo Kuitca, Alejandro Puente, Jorge Macchi, Sergio Avello, Marcelo Pombo, Alfredo Londaibere, Roberto Aizenberg, Santantonín, Matías Duville, Inés Drangosch, Cecilia Biagini, Déborah Pruden, Carles Congost, Ruy Krygier.
5. What tendencies or groupings from common elements do you see in argentine art of the last ten or fifteen years?
Time (Tiempo, 1991) and Life, Death and Resurrection (Vida, muerte y resurrección, 1980), pieces by Víctor Grippo, they are very powerful works about the transformations suffered by things and the power of some of the materials worked on by an artists, besides, the subject of the germination of beans that destroys the sealed lead recipients that contains them, seems to me to be an image about working in art and about how art works in the world.
