Hello Federico and welcome to NotRandomArt. The current issue is revolving around the problem of communication and identity. Is there any particular way you would describe your identity as an artist but also as a human being in dynamically changing, unstable times? In particular, does your cultural substratum/identity form your aesthetics?
Hi NotRandomArt. Thank you for interviewing me. I consider myself man first and artist second, as musician Atahualpa Yupanqui used to say. Had it been the opposite, after some time my ego would leave me blind. I am a conglomerate of experiences. One is in the moment and in the situation in which one is placed, you are what you do with what you have and with the resources that you were given in the moment that you were projected to the world. And it is not only what you do, it is how you do it. I consider that we are all artists as long as we maintain creativity active and pulsing. It is not something stable, it can happen once in a while or through periods. It is a constant exercise that I have to do to stay fresh. I speak of creativity in all its forms, she is not a property of the arts, it is inherent to the human being. Creativity is, to me, related to Joseph Beuys’ idea of the artist and what he speaks of as the anthropological purpose of art: more humanistic and away from the idea of the renaissance conception. In this changing world, defininf ourselves by just one word is cutting down on the possibilities of the Being and of seeing the hues that surround us, that is why the concept of water in the Tao plays a role in me and my artwork, because of its flexibility and capacity to adapt to the becoming of my path. My interest as a person and as an artist usually goes develops around the query of the Being and of social relationships. I consider myself that the relationship with the other is as important as one’s personal development, because I believe in the human collective for the human development. Opposite to the passive process of waiting for a superhero to save us, finding the internal artist in oneself is an active process and of huge importance for the current times.
As for my cultural identity, considering it as those experiences accumulated up to this day in Argentina, I consider that it is present in my artwork for two main reasons. The first, more inconscious, aludes to my way of perceiving and the mental classifications that everyone develops when growing uo, like formal processes of Piaget or the artistic education theories of Lowenfield, or Arnheim, we incorporate tools to understand and organize what we percieve, and from it we formulate a word or a drawing and a meaning.
The more conscious one aludes to the Buenos Aires geography, its history and the culture in which I grew up, in which I saw, ran, smelled. I work with polarized concepts and Argentine is land of opposites, in its geography, its history and its culture. And the most extreme expression of this was the recent civic-military dictatorship that started 1976 and which left 30,000 missing people and thousands of tortured, though we were not the only country in the region who went through this sort of ‘process’.
On this matter I will say that it is not necessary to go through these states of animality on the quest for identity or truth. This period is now reclaimed through the moto: Memory, Truth and Justice. Memory plays a key role in remembering the past to avoid making the same mistakes in the present, and seeking to move forward in social contract conceptions, democratic and peace-wise too. Today in Argentina, after 43 years of uninterrupted democracy, there are no mass killings. Regarding human rights, Argentina was the first country to prosecute her repressors. On the other hand, mas media now is capable of manipulating public opinion and we can now see Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Times concepts put into practice. And I have tried to depict all these in my series ”States of Being” in the dualities of light and darkness, the exteriors and the interiors, the hot and the cold, reality as opposed to dreams, fake news, utopia and distopia, south or north. i place the subject in the stairs in the saturated light with no notion of the horizon or truth and the ambiguity is in the gender of the subject and whether he, she or it is going down or up.
Would you like to tell us something about your artistic as well as life background? What inspired you to be in this artistic point in your life when you are now?
I was born in Buenos Aires, my relationship with art started with the paintings my grandfather did as a hobby. I never met him but I inhereted his paintings and books. I always had a pencil in my hand and my parents saw that as a quality, I always had their support, them being an engineer and a teacher. I am a bachelor in Visual Arts and I have a master Art Therapy, I work as a teacher and art therapist, I design and make scenography apart from working on my artistic investigations. For several years now I have practiced Kung Fu and QiGong, which introduced me to self exploration. I use these techniques on my painting, I usually travel, long travels, short travels and now I find myself in Akureyri, Iceland at the Gilfelagid Society’s residency completing “States of Being” , my last series. Iceland has the ideal geography for this series, it is where lava and ice blend. I like to test myself in different places, chaning habits tends to break with certain ideas that we carry with us and it is in this way that I find how to self explore. I don’t find it good to travel too much, I need pauses to reflect.
Could you identify a specific artwork that has influenced your artistic practice or has impacted the way you think about your identity as a participant of the visual culture?