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.
Locus solus: Its photographic version consists of a series of 20 photographs taken with a color negative film ISO 110 and copied by contact. The result are photographic images of 12mm x 16mm each, the motive being the light in the forest (in different types of forests).
Its installation within the exhibition space tends to a certain imperceptibility of the image, uncovering the architectonic structure, the medium and part of the work itself.
Each of the photographes were mounted on aluminum and fixed under a 2mm glass, emphasizing its quality of being a photographic object; photographs were supposed to be fixed onto a wall at the height of an average viewer (1,7m, approximately), and not closer than 1m. away one from the other.
The filmic version of “Locus Solus” was made in black and white s8 and digitally edited. Light in the forest is what happens during 4 hours of filming, captured in less than a 3-minute film.
The motivation for this series was to pose questions on the world’s representation project by means of a photographic device; the problem of (human) scale as in relation to perception; an architectonic space containing the idea of a non-architectonic space (a forest), and the photographic format as an instrument to meaning.
Due to a number of journeys made back then that were not connected with the making of this work, the photographic series was not completed until a few years later, in 2004, and first exhibited in 2005.
2. In general terms, how would you suggest to approach your work?
In relation to the above, each work or series of works is connected with the previous one in a significant way, and despite the fact that I think that the approach to any artistic work has to be non-predetermined, the narration thread between the works allows to follow –one way or the other- the decisions taken along the way and the production. Beyond the problem of one’s personal choices, this is a possible way to read a work of art.
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?
Western tradition.
My references are mostly literary, filmic, theorical, musical, etc. Some names: John Zorn, Nicolas Varchausky, de Rijke / de Rooij, Andrej Tarkovsky, Bill Viola, Cesare Pavese, Fernando Pessoa, Antonio di Benedetto, etc.
Artists I’m interested in: Esteban Pastorino, Ernesto Ballesteros, Pablo Siquier, Claudia Fontes, Diana Aisenberg (etc) and all the later generation of contemporary Argentine artists.
4. Choose works or exhibitions from the last ten or fifteen years which in your opinion were very significant and explain why
Julio Grinblatt at the ICI, by the end of the 1990s, it was an exhibition of photographs of hotel corridors, copies were black and white and small, without any frame, conclusive and perfect. I was shocked by the generous deed of showing a photographic image with no interference or protection, and the text of the catalogue, describing the chemical process of developing (times, marks, etc.) as if saying: “You could have done it too”.
'Photoplay’, a photographic work from the Chase Manhattan Collection at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, also by the end of the 1990s. There, I was lucky enough as to see live and altogether works by James Welling, Andrés Serrano, Barbara Krueger, Sophie Calle, Sherrie Levine, Chuck Close, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gurky, Alfredo Jaar, etc. etc. etc.
This exhibition was fundamental for my education as an artist.
5. What tendencies or groupings from common elements do you see in argentine art of the last ten or fifteen years?
(I prefer the term ‘grouping’ rather than ‘tendency’).
It’s clear that necessity makes the union, and the union makes the force, the concentration of objectives and the fulfillment. This can be easily verified by the little documentation that exists on the large amount of artists grouped under different names in different parts of the country who have, since the mid 1990s, put into practice a series of ideas and ways of understanding art.
The common element to all these groups is, first, the idea of friendship, guaranteeing a certain cohesion of ideas beyond the normal differences within the production methods of each of them individually (without taking into consideration art collectives, that produce a work of art not separately, but together, and where the production is an evidence of the affective bond that unites them) and a certain degree of consciousness in the idea that no one will do for one’s own work more than oneself.
