Biography
I was born in 1964 in Buenos Aires. From my education in architecture, my worries and occupations are mainly focused in popular habitat-related problems. I have worked in the public and in the private sector, developing proposals in the social dwelling field. Though I have been always linked to drawing, because of my occupation I had never painted before. The 2001/02 crisis impacted me a lot, personally and professionally. I felt the need to begin painting, and so I began taking classes with a great professor and painter, Miguel Ronsino. I have participated in several collective exhibitions and two individual ones. "Ariel Caballin paintings", in the Buenos Aires City Legislature in 2005. This year I have carried out "uncertain certainties" in Encontré Gallery – Art and Design, in San Telmo (Buenos Aires).
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.
I choose two works. Orange love (2004) and One + one (2007). In Orange Love I try to reflect "that" passionate, infinite and ideal love. The bodies are in an horizontal way, almost melted among themselves. Practically only the extremities give trails to realize that there are two characters in the scene. There is no space among them. They are just one. Orange, because I feel it is an encouraging color or perhaps there is some reference to the popular saying about the orange halves where one feels incomplete until finding the other one. That controversial image, loving utopia, of a single thing. In One + one, "that" love is more real. It undresses the complexity of establishing links with another human being. The difficulties to articulate the couple spaces and the individual ones. The bodies are already in a vertical possition, something unites and separates them at the same time. They want but they can´t, they can but don´t want… Each one looks with a single eye, the eye of its own subjectivity and perhaps because of that, in spite of being in the same space, each sub-space (the space of each one) has its own tone. Constructively, both are similar, there´s a layer over layer of different techniques (pencil, acrylic, paper, glue, wax, synthetic enamel and oil). In both of them, there is a previous plan, to which I was consciously attentive, generating permanent accidents, through the use of different techniques that allow me to revise the original plan.
2. In general terms, how would you suggest to approach your work?
It is difficult for me to indicate any kind of reading, specially refering to my works. I do not believe in the "instruction manuals" for 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?
Several tastes and references. Nevertheless, there is an undeniable attraction to the artistic production from the sixties. Maybe it has to do with that social, political and historic moment when everything seemed to be possible. Everything was modifiable. Some of them are: Alberto Greco, Berni, Heredia, Bacon, Noe, Venturi, Alonso, Lucian Freud, Deira, Testa…
4. Choose works or exhibitions from the last ten or fifteen years which in your opinion were very significant and explain why
The Deira retrospective in the Fine Arts Museum of Buenos Aires in 2006.
