Texto

“I dream with the past that I long for, the old time that I cry and it will never
come back”. With this quote, Gardel bid farewell to love, and I, eighty
years later, can feel my strokes and colors reaching its form and essence.
My first steps were in Barrio Valdivieso and its cemeteries. Among the
silent streets and its outdated bars, I discovered buttoned suits, vigorous
mustaches, and the reigning old age. I imagined and narrated untold
stories, constructed as sailor’s whispers, grief-stricken cowboys by the
steppe, and men swallowed by the time and oblivion. These bodies and
lives anchored in the longing were the ones that my hands began creating
and giving life in the streets, drawings and paintings.

In the beginning, I got inebriated with their free voices made of the tide,
time and memory. They were my grandparents seeking and creating new
universes with their hands toughened by wood, routine and high seas.
They were the seasoned ones of the world embarking in history, without
statues or golden dawns, just existing in their infinite enterprises and
detailed routine with the exact amount of painting or the calculated curve
by heart. Carpenters, shoemakers, tanners; cowboys and their lassos;
sailors and their moldy ropes.
With the passing of the years, I learned to track the wrinkles of old visages.
Whispers of life in the skin.
I wove shapes in the walls where they once loved, suffered, lose or
deceased, among the city and sea, among the heat of their buildings and
the night of death. I always thought in their lives as tributes and siren calls,
from time to time maybe, as my own colored existence.
From that point on, everything grew. With those faces, I built fantastic
worlds that they dream about one day and I, in a way of a released longing,
give them shape, life, and death. Harbors, sunken ships, oceans lost in
time, elegance, respect and justice. Robert Stevenson would say that I am
a free “gentleman of fortune”; I would add that I am the arm that paints
from the depths of the sea.

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