Biography
I’m Argentinian. I live and work in Buenos Aires. I graduated as an architect in 1978. After working professionally in that field for a couple of years, I decided to pursue on the visual arts full time. First with sculpture and ceramics. I was awarded with the Grand Prize of Honor at the Ceramic room of 1989. Years later I continued with photography and painting. I was awarded with the Leonardo Prize of photography 2002. I took part of several exhibitions, collective and individual mostly here in Argentina. I took part of the IX Biennale of the Habana, Cuba in 2006. I constantly searched to communicate through my images; also to connect with my colleagues collaborating to generate a commercial healthy art circuit, until 2002 when I opened my own gallery: Isidro Miranda, first in the San Isidro borough and then in the central neighborhood of San Telmo. The most memorable of my management at Isidro Miranda gallery was to be able to organize the Platt Prize along with the Platt Group having the privilege to receive first class artists and to connect through art with the best of art. In 2006 I published the photographic essay “The construction of the past” with texts from Valeria González and Julio Sánchez.
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 the “Scaffolding” series from 2004. It is a series of three works, post-painted photography on canvas of 2mts X 2mts. I think it’s a complete work in several ways. It came up when, after many years of lonely and intimate work, I went out of my workshop and started to look and photograph the city of Buenos Aires and its people, wondering around issues related to a “circle” conception of time and the “traces” that are left in the city. Regarding the technique, I chose to work on photography to focus on the subject and then with painting to cover what I considered “accessory”. It seemed a coherent language to express this new viewpoint.
2. In general terms, how would you suggest to approach your work?
“Scaffolding” represents what is transitory. That that is temporarily set to actually build permanent places. Meanwhile, the construction workers live permanently on the scaffoldings. And so do we, in a way.
Everything is provisory. Everything is transitory.
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?
My education was humanistic and also encyclopedic. I am fundamentally curious. I get bored with the encounters while new searches stimulate me and that’s why I went through very different phases. I am interested on being able to use the language and the technique that best adapts to each process, to each idea, although I may not recognize myself in my previous works. In this matter, to approach the work and the artistic attitude of Gerhard Richter made me look after my ideas, rather than my style. One of the most intense artists of today is Sophie Calle, I admire her.
4. Choose works or exhibitions from the last ten or fifteen years which in your opinion were very significant and explain why
I would like to mention the contemporary art collection of Jorge Helft. At first, just because as an artists, I find more significant an art collection than a transitory exhibition. To see at a same space amazing artists from Berni to some of the ones named in the Bola de Nieve website is definitely overwhelming. I also note the passion which Jorge talks about each one of his pieces, it is more stimulating than to hear the artists themselves talking about their own work.
5. What tendencies or groupings from common elements do you see in argentine art of the last ten or fifteen years?
Beyond other groups that are better defined by those who study I personally see two distinct types of art: on one hand the art of experimentation and risks and on the other the art that repeats tasted and fashionable formulas.