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.
The work that represents me is the one I'm about to do.
Now I will speak about Material reconstruction [Reconstrucción Material], an exhibition I made in Mar del Plata, Baltar Contemporary Space, in 2006.
There I worked by drawing the walls of the room. The drawings came out from a dream. The idea was to start with some images I remembered clearly: some white wolves looked at me puzzled and glowed in the dark, a car in which I was taking a ride with friends... and the other things emerged at the moment I started the action of drawing.
The experience was wonderful, in the first place because I worked directly on the walls (something I wasn’t doing) and because the materials I used allowed me to access the picture from another place. I used charcoal as a first attempt to find a position into the space, to build scenes, then I started working with the brush and in that moment everything started to join. I left some drawings in charcoal, painted with various shades of gray and used much black. At first the space seemed to be my workshop, I made and erased drawings. On the opening day, the story was about the dream and the experience with the drawing. The work was in process. I could have gone on drawing the whole month or I could have left it as it was.
2. In general terms, how would you suggest to approach your work?
What dwells in my work is the idea of telling something. I find a story that I can use as a trigger. The layers of work lead me to a different place than the point of departure. The best feeling is to be lost.
I find interesting that the people who look can make their own journey. In order to start with an idea and get to another one. I suggest being present and letting oneself go by the first thing one think and feel.
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 identify with the cartoonists, the comic genre, silent cinema and with fantasy literature.
Some benchmarks among my contemporaries are: Muñoz y Sampayo, Tulio de Sagastizábal, Carolina Antoniadis, Pablo Siquier, Julia Masvernat, Leila Tschopp, Erica Bohm, Leticia El Halli Obeid, Marcela Sinclair, Lorraine Green, Catalina León, Matías Duville, Eduardo Basualdo, Raymond Pettibone, Mónica Girón, Petra Mrzyk and Jean-François Moriceau, Max Gómez Canle, Karen Kilimnik, Neo Rauch, Magdalena Jitrik, Mariela Scafati, Kara Walker.
Of previous generations: Eduard Munch, Gustave Courbet, Victtorica, Delacroix, De Chirico, Edward Hopper.
I also consider important all those persons involved in my personal context and who don’t belong exclusively to the visual arts world.
4. Choose works or exhibitions from the last ten or fifteen years which in your opinion were very significant and explain why
An exhibition by Catalina León, in Sendros Gallery, in 2004. I liked it very much, especially the room that had painted pieces of plaster scattered on the floor. They were rubble transformed into treasures.
A picture by Julia Masvernat I saw in the CCEBA made with painted strips of paper tape, an abstract painting very meditated and so accidentally built. A tile painted by Marcelo Pombo.
The retrospective exhibition of Victtorica in the Recoleta Cultural Center. I remember it as the moment I understood painting as a genuine possibility of knowledge. The square located in a disused factory, made in 2004 by Julián D'Angiolillo, was a chilling and moving experience. The traffic, the sound that accompanied the steps in any direction you tried to move in the place, the lighting and materials used for the construction and redefinition of that space seemed to envelop the visitor in a state of sleep. The work of Provisorio Permanente in Ruth Benzacar Gallery. I saw that scene as a drawing carried into space, a frozen story but one that threw out a lot of pictures that accompanied it. Eliana Heredia’s exhibition at 713 Gallery in 2007. I was moved by the main room where there was a storm of foam rubber, mixed with pieces of all kinds of materials without falling into the material’s anecdote. It became into something else, and started to live beyond the material.