Biography
I was born in Buenos Aires in 1962. Since 1977 I live in Mar del Plata. I have practised football professionally until 1988, when I became injured. I was a journalist. In 1992 I started a framing workshop, a task that made me become related with art. I studied in the Martín Malharro School of Visual arts between 1994 and 1998. I was consecutively selected in 1999/2000 and 2001/2002 for the Work Production and Analysis Grants that the Antorchas Foundation fostered in the International Contemporary Art Fund of Mar del Plata. During those four years I had the fortune to have teachers such as Claudia Fontes, Jorge Macchi, Tulio de Sagastizábal and Claudia del Río. In the year 2004, I was invited by TRAMA to the regional sessions for Management Analysis for Initiatives by Emergent Artists, held at the Espacio VOX, Bahía Blanca, Argentina. Between 2006 and 2008 I took part in the sessions for analysis and production, coordinated by Diana Aisenberg, Rafael Cippolini, and Fabián Burgos, held at the Casa Bruzzone Museum of Mar del Plata.
When I left my studies in 1998, I wondered how it would be to work as an “artist”, and I found it difficult to find an answer. Today, almost ten years afterwards, I find myself surrounded by activities and situations related to art. Full-blown production, expanding human relations, constant concentration on everything I observe, capacity to perceive the surroundings and immediately connect them with one thinks and produces, ideas that become linked to one another, and the overcoming necessity of making them known…pleasure, and more pleasure.
I am also a collector of contemporary art. Acquiring different works with some rather unorthodox methods, taking advantage of their abandon by certain artists in my workshop. This “forgetfulness” allows me to appropriate the work, and then revalidate them in some way. Sometimes a swap for my woek, and in other occasions, for framing jobs.
With almost no money changing hands, I was able to assemble around 80 works.
As of 1997, I have been participating of shows and salons, of which the following stand out: Bienal Nacional Bahía Blanca 2007 and 2008, MAC Bahía Blanca/ ArteBA 2002, 2003 y 2006 , La Rural, Buenos Aires/ Expotrastiendas 2004 C.C.Borges/ Periférica 2005 C.C.Borges/ “Ojo al País” 2003 Centro Cultural Borges, Buenos Aires/ Estudio Abierto Retiro 2003, Harrods, Buenos Aires/ “Forma Pura” 2004, Motp, Mar del Plata/ Alianza Francesa 2003, Mar del Plata and Bahía Blanca/ Club del Dibujo 2002 Mar del Plata / II Bienal de Dibujo Contemporáneo (Contemporary Drawing Biennial) 2003, Buenos Aires/ Salón Nacional de Rosario 2002, 2005 y 2006, Castagnino Museum in Rosario/ “Contemporánea 03”, Foyer Auditorium, Mar del Plata/ Premio Argentino de Artes Visuales (Argentinian Visual Arts Award) 2006 ,OSDE, Buenos Aires and La Plata (MACLA)/ Shoes in Mopt, y Baltar Contemporáneo galleries (MdP), Brodersohn-Martinez (Buenos Aires), Roberto Vanguardia (Rosario).
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 will take a license and choose two. “Red, Black and White”, made in 2002, and “Water”, one of the latest of this 2008, installed in one of the toilets of the Casa Bruzzone Museum in Mar del Plata. The first one was simultanously a starting- and convergence point of several factors that I had not taken into account until then. Chance, my craft as a glass cutter, the appearance of the latter as fundamental material, color and refractions of light were all drawn together.
The juxtaposition of glass bands began to be the method for my work, and I realized the possiblilties it offered me, finding innumberable effects which I continue to discover up to this date. The material proposes things and I use it manipulating the construction with guidelines I make up as I go on. In the second work I performed the opposite process. That is to say, I develop an idea with the same material, only this time I am restrained by my interest to represent something, in this case in way of a deception, and this is achieved occasionally when I find a coincidence between the idea, the space, and the material to be used. In “Water” it was gratifying to find spectators who believed to see an open tap and tried to close it to prevent it from further leaking.
2. In general terms, how would you suggest to approach your work?
With calmness, time and much slowness.
I believe it is a very visual work, regardless of the concepts that may be formulated afterwards. I attempted for it to be beautiful as a first goal. I discovered that refracted color is impossible to paint. Despite seeming to be a non-narrative work, I believe it to be a constant metaphor, since it unwaveringly leads the spectator to a need to watch it several times from different points of view. Not all that is seen at first is what it appears to be. There is always an angle, a need to lift your feet, a looking from beneath that surprises us. I comment on this because it happens to me constantly as I produce these pantings-drawings-objects, of which I sometimes ask myself what they are for, but that I cannot refrain from watching.
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?
Mi condition as a compulsive consumer of art causes me to be influenced by a mountain of artists from all times, not only visual, but also from other genres such as music, film, architecture, literature and “illusionism”, which I stress as a genre for my case, since I take Criss Angel as an almost fundamental reference. He is an New Yorker illusionist who performs incredible feats, with his “mind powers”, levitations, sudden dematerializings, escapisms, acts of magic and more. Sometimes, bearing in mind the distances, I feel that with my works I am in the place of Criss Angel, and what I look for ist to be asked how I do it, to withold my answer.
At first sight, my works refer to pop-art and the cynetic movement from where I can mention Vasarely, Soto, Cruz Diez, Le parc, but I do not believe it to end there. I find a certain conceptualism in my production processes, a kind of laboratory, which generates another type of works, and this drives me closer to artists such as Donald Judd, Frank Stella, Gerard Ritcher, Imi Knoebel, Blinky Palermo, Mondrian, Kabakov, Morris, the Konsortum group from Berlin, Katharine Grosse, Daniel Buren, architects Oscar Niemayer and Frank Ghery, amongst others. I
also have a preference for the Argentinian concrete movement, and also for Luis Tomasello, Tomás Maldonado, Manuel Espinosa, Magariños, Polesello, Kosice, Alejandro Puente, Fabián Burgos, Sergio Avello, Ernesto Ballesteros, and the fundamental Alberto Greco.
There are thousands who bear influence on my moods and thought, but I shall mention the ability and rebelliousness of Rauschenberg, the freshness of Basquiat, the irony of andy Warhol, the sixties’ psicodelia of The Velvet Underground with singer Nico, Syd Barret, the love for life of Joseph Beuys, the dilemma over death of Damián Hirst, and people like Vigo, Grippo, Alexander Calder, Kippenberger, Eduardo Costa, Federico Peralta Ramos, Edgardo Giménez, Jorge Macchi, Miguel Rothschilds, Norman Briski, David Byrne, Peter Gabriel, the Reynold band, Talking Heads, Yoko Ono, Kuitca, Oiticica, Gego, Leandro Erlich, Borges, Cortázar, Roland Barthes, Tim Burton, The Cure, Bob Dylan, Hendrix, Pj Harvey, Ian Anderson, Julián Opie, Cristian Marclay, Bjork, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba, Carlos Soria, Diego Capuzzotto, “Gordo” Casero, “negro” Olmedo, “flaco” Oscar Vega from Rosario, a total genious, and a million more….
4. Choose works or exhibitions from the last ten or fifteen years which in your opinion were very significant and explain why
I choose to mention the “geometric” show of the Cisneros collection at Malba. Rogelio Polesello in Cronopios Recoleta, with his works in black and white from the sixties.
Eduardo Costa in Ruth Benzacar, when he showed his acrylic fruits in volume and then proceded to cut some of them transversally, letting their internal configuration to be seen. I found that excellent.
“Los Gauchos Guemes” at Motp in Mar del Plata, a show that was forgotten, but that stemmed a great internal debate amongst the members, of which I had the fortune to participate, where the total destruction of the show was proposed minutes before the opening, only to re-assemble it as it was possible at the time.
“Lagrimas Asesinas” by Miguel Rothschilds at Ruth Benzácar, a fim narrated in a series of animatics fixed to a shelf that ran along the perimeter of the room.
The work “Horizon” by Jorge Macchi, made out of a row of nails and their corresponding shadows forming a line on the wall, in Ruth Bénzacar. Sol Lewitt and Jesús Soto in Proa, Julio Le Parc a few years ago, and Tomas Maldonado in 2007 at the Museo Nacional, not to be missed.
“El ojo de Vega”, by Oscar Vega in the Castagnino Museum of Rosario, a show where one of his utopical deliriums was a project to create a section of the Paraná river that would circle alongone of the streets of downtown Rosario, and thus recreate a sort of Venice with its bridges and gondolas.
Sebastián Gordín at ICI, with the maquette of the show on the sidewalk.
The 2002 Alejandro Puente retrospective at the Castagnino in Rosario.
The work “El Dandy” by Amadeo Azar, “retrato de Manuel Belgrano” by Marcelo Merino, “vitrolita” by Sergio “Chango” Gutierrez, and a tape with the recording of the sounds from the engine of a Fiat 147 by Gustavo Christiansen, which are part of my collection.
5. What tendencies or groupings from common elements do you see in argentine art of the last ten or fifteen years?
The basic common element, as I understand it, is access to information. When institutions decided to spread information through important referents amongst the local art scene towards the mainland of our immense country, a contention network began to be formed grouping many artists scatterd everywhere who had no possibilites to make their languages circulate beyond their own walls.
The meetings amongst artists generated a different kind of relationship between them, a very kind one, where a trust in the other is developed, criticism is accepted, and the carrying out of artistic events of all sorts is stimulated. Artists then appear doing management, and being concerned to gain spaces that they never had.
This began to generate an immense network, such as this snowball that summons us today and that is also part of this network, making all, or almost all of us to be able to show their work.
In any case, this will not ve positive if it is not taken as an opportunity to improve those works in the benefit of a better life individually and of a genuine insertion to our communities.
