Articles
 



Three emerging artists

Taken from the Magazine Southward Art, february 2003

Through steady learning, Marcos Acosta, Sol Halabi and Ramiro Vázquez have achieved complete mastery of their craft without obliterating their singularities. They are three young artists from Córdoba, Argentina, who could be deemed "emerging" on account of the expressive power of their images and the personal way in which they are developing their own language.

In addition to artistic skills, the creation of a work of art entails the wish to explore new perspectives capable of feeding the implicit or explicit enigmas that haunt each artist. To be willing to take the rish of questioning images and their meanings seems to me a precondition for artistic production, and I believe Acosta, Halabi and Vázquez are heading in that direction.

Avoiding stereotypes, Marcos Acosta places a great emphasis on social issues. He has accomplished some good dramatic moments by developing a concise line that explores and fractures form and by using a palette that exacerbates the contrast among colours in a rough and categorical way. Positioned in the dimension of gestures, the artist manages to convey both vigour and emotion, Acosta delves into the characters and situations with provoking spirit, questioning images and events alike. As in Terrible Sudamérica (Terrible South America) and ¡No hay que mirar! (Don't look!), his artistic proposal is particularly effective when blurs the division between characters, depriving them of chaotic contours. When he pursuits this line, his paintings are truly extraordinary, not constrained by the topic, free to tackle notions of parody and the grotesque with accuracy and creativity.

Sol Halabi deals with the female figure, although it seems that she is not interested in presenting it in terms of gender. It is clear to me that her search for the relationship between the female body ad its singular attitude on the one hand, and pictorial activities on the other, aims to incorporate the phantasmagoric and the psychological "Sin aviso (Without warning), Sentada (Sitting), Susurro (Whisper)". In my view, the artist either purposely subjects herself to that oscillation, which she never clearly defines or, going in an opposite direction, seeks to destroy the physiognomy and identity of the self-absorbed depicted figure and stresses the spatial aspect of the composition, which allows her to introduce the hazy context.

Maybe the sense of indistinctness and the disturbing resemblance between figure and background play an even more crucial part than thatof the body. Sol Halabi, and this is not value judgement, is lees accurate than Vázquez in the touch and direction of thr strokes, and foreign to Acosta's expressive line.

The lack of these two features allows her to paint frankly, leaving her very close of setting a "counter-model" and of achieving a thorough psychological opening of the image.

The third member of this emerging trio is Ramiro Vázquez, who, in the manner of a troubadour of images, puts up his puppet show in a deceptive and festive atmosphere. His paintings present us with a theatre of equivocations end of transvestiteopposites, characters that smile frankly and yet disturbingly, contest and celebrations that have an ominous undertone, or are enigmatic and mocking.

Although there are some fragile bonds between Vázquez's characters and Seguí's figures, he saves them from becoming stereotypesby putting them in the spotlight and manipulating them a playful manner that is also cryptic, so that they are festive but not altogether transparent, free but compulsive, human but masked. The landscape is both a stage and event, because it is not always possible to elucidate whether things and beings are placed on it or sprouting if from a parallel universe.

The artist invites to us to find out what is all about. Things may false chromatic modesty, Vázquez takes his paintings toward radiant places but also towards half-lights: the lights and shadows of a story without an end.

by Horacio Safons

 

Fancis Bacon

Ten years ago Francis Bacon died. He was the most important artist of the XX century. His canvas were paid in million dollars. Through the painting, he denounced the aggression that the humans exert to each other.
THE PAINTER OF THE VIOLENCE AND THE HORROR.
By Laura Haimovici, Clarín April 27th, 2002. Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The pop culture rendered a rare tribute to Francis Bacon: In the film "Batman", Jack Nicholson - as the "Joker"- enters in the Museum of Beautiful Arts of Gothic City and after destroying paints of Picasso and Degas, is subjugated by a painting. "I like it", he said. Francis Bacon, who ten anniversary of death is tomorrow, was not a painter of the good taste, those who slide his brush to satisfy the aesthetic fashionable and foreseeable concepts.
"In absence of a subject that corrodes you intimately, one falls inevitably in the decoration", he thought maintained. A kind of bad boy of the Beautiful Arts of Century Twenty, his human figure is a shade deformed by the slide of his brush . A face with the absent look and a body that seems to have passed through a session torture. Twisted people, injured, mutilating, as a puzzle with misalignments. "The people hate my paintings, they seem horrible to them, and it satisfies me. My paintings must have something special. The people think my paintings are images of horror, but I cannot compete with the real world" the author of "Three studies for a self portrait" and "Crucifixión" said.
The violence that he exerts in his paintings is not casual. He was born in Dublín, Ireland, in 1909. Bacon explained: "the tragedy is something natural in me. I remember when I was five years old, my father spoke to me of the beginnings of the First World War. At that time we were in Ireland and we used to speak of ' problems'. Soon the Second World War came. That is the reason, the circumstances of the time at which each person lived". Distant relative of the english philosopher Francis Bacon, his father was dedicated to train race horses. When the painter had about sixteen years old he left his house of the street Lower Baggot and left to London. Soon after, with a pension that his mother sent to him, he went Berlin, to live the pleasures on the nocturnal life, and a time later he went to Paris, where he discovered Picasso and his own desire to paint.
He did not go to the academy or to any class of teacher. He designed furniture and carpets to obtain some income money and his work began to appear with images from the war through the religious subjects ("Three studies for the figure on the foot of the cross" are of the years ´40). The Museum of Modern Art of New York bought the work and began to show his productions in the great galleries of the world.
The man of the leather jacket and fallen hair on the eyes and annoying gesture never made nothing to hide his border life. He liked the alcohol, the game and the boys. It fed a fame on sadist which arrived at his maximum point when in 1971 his lover George Dyer decided to commit suicide in the room of a hotel as disordered and chaotic as the study in which he worked. "The better painter of the feminine meat is Ingres. If you can not love a woman you can not paint something as beautiful as 'the Turk bath´. I like men: the masculine meat is very interesting, I like its quality ", he assured.
He was the British representative in the great biennials of the world. During an auction in Sotheby's, in 1989, almost 7 million dollars were paid on his "Triptic May - June", amount that never had been invested on a work of English author. He had panic to the artifice and he persecuted the crude reality obsessively. "the painting is so difficult", he lamented. "Through that lie is necessary to catch the truth". Is the truth he had felt in the outlines of Miguel Angel, Velazquez and Picasso. As far as his works, it always pushed the same yearning: "I would like my paintings to have the same immediate effect as the photo of a wild animal after a hunting". And, although he declared himself as optimist, to him living and painting only was the way "to be civilized on the way to face the horror".