Biography
I was born in Gálvez, Santa Fe, 1965, where I first established contact with drawing at the workshops of the primary school I used to attend. Later on, I moved to Santa Fe where I began to write and had the chance to meet other artists who were mostly into literature. Soon after my first solo showing at the Cultural Centre, I settled in the city of Rosario, place that I chose to live and work. In 1996, patiently, I began the Fine Arts school. Due to my need to deepen more precisely into my research I took serigraphy and photography workshops; not only in Rosario but in other cities of the interior of the country; this experience allowed me an essential opportunity of getting to know other ways of working and “being”. With time, the invitations received from artists of different locations served as a circuit of divulgation of my work; that may also be seen at blogs in the internet.
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 a work of 2005. Protected House was a complex one. This proposal had my house as support and took a few hours. Different corners of my house were occupied with photos that were cut and pasted as a collage. The photos reproduced pieces of real, everyday objects related to the “possibility of defense” and operating as a replacement for the real objects. There was a book with home safety recipes and advice of all kinds, also a small selection of photos taken at random from a safety box which had been installed sometime ago by my neighbors and that for some mysterious reason remained always empty. There was a soundtrack of western spaghetti. The invitation was made to a very broad spectrum of people (some involved in the arts, some not) who could also invite others and walk freely around the house. Long after the show ended, I decided to format the idea and play it on a blog on the Internet; there you can go over a tour of my house. While changing the support of the showing, I did not edit it, I just returned to work on the main concept. These experiences were fundamental within my artistic process and helped me taking new decisions on other projects in which I continue to investigate my relationship with “reality”, with the audience, and with the circuits of the artworks.
2. In general terms, how would you suggest to approach your work?
My work flows through different formats and supports that are interrelated and can be seen separately or in a whole. There are photographs, urban interventions, invitations resulting in audience’s actions and blogs. They are held by ideas and the sensitivity of their own history. There is not a linear way to read them, they operate through empathy.
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 prefer to point out extensive references that form a universe that is constantly re-visited: The Book of Tao in the very poetic version of Ursula Le Guin, by its clear mystery, simplicity and synthesis. Gil Gauchito Altars, which photographs I collect, because they belong to us all and for their seductive ritual obsession. The Cerro Colorado Pictographs (Córdoba), an open-air museum that one must climb and walk, for its sensitivity, the place allows direct contact with the audience and its own geographical environment. The Dito Vivo by Alberto Greco which allowed me to glimpse that the place of art is the one revealed by the artist. The group "In Step" that here in Rosario used to break into the city with his powerful works, ephemeral, with a very precise visual language. Lucrecia Martel's films, for his photography and language that looks very much like art.
4. Choose works or exhibitions from the last ten or fifteen years which in your opinion were very significant and explain why
Grippo's retrospective at the Malba, for its assets: everyday like and metaphysical at the same time, the sense of work, labor, laboratory and relentless pursuit it delivers, for its potential to cause intimacy and for causing a slow and retailer time in our sight. Also the assembly itself seemed just ideal.
5. What tendencies or groupings from common elements do you see in argentine art of the last ten or fifteen years?
The current cultural field diversifies and broadens its own possibilities to the chaotic. It is remarkable the amount of proposals for courses, seminars and workshops formulated not only by institutions already recognized, but also by groups and artists that install their own spaces and criteria often without much thought on the matter. The periphery, in view of Buenos Aires as the historical center, is growing up, sometimes staring too much towards the capital, the centre, instead they should stick on that process of great effort that I would love to see it in continuity, for it has the potential to transform the current cultural map. The roads for art exchange increasingly expand outside the circuit of galleries and institutions, through the urban and the internet, so many that it is impossible to follow them, much less to know where from and the conceptual statements that lay behind them.
