It starts with a fixed gaze, one that captures everything. After that, the form, subsuming every possibility of what is and what could have been. Every painter looks to give form to that which does not have it. There is thus a misticism in art: we believe in the possiblity of an outside to the familiar structures of being themselves, in the possiblity of transforming a state of consciousness into a meticulously constructed object. The precision of clockmaking defines work in the studio.

Paintings find me in the act of making them.

I began painting fortuitously, dropped in front of canvases equipped with paintbrushes, oils, and turpentine. In my early career, I traveled between figuration and abstraction. Today, I am excited by the possibility of visual narrative. Painting can tell a story, can be the story, not just the symbol of another one.

I was born in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. My parent’s political militancy, my grandparents’ migrations from Italy and Paraguay, the tanneries in my neighbourhood, waste grounds, and shantytowns marked my childhood. Though these experiences writhe on the canvas today, I did not think of this then.

I received my formal training at the Manuel Belgrano and Pridiliano Pueyrredón schools. However, it was in Oscar “Pascual” Granato’s studio that I discovered what painting really is, and learned to see color in terms of harmony and language. For me, color is form. I draw upon the Andean world where color is emotion, exclamation, and assertion. Color fights; it can be forcefull yet pragmatic, tolerant without being self-abnegating.

My work process is a combination of control and chaos, of fits and patience. The studio is a place where everything is at the service of pictoral construction. Inside the studio, thought is action and it has concrete consequences.

My subject is human experience both individual and collective. My paintings show people and places which I understand as spaces of actions. Just like in narrative, my paintings are places where things happen.

Though I return to the same subjects, they are in a constant state of flux: Solitude and multitude, myth and reason, change and immutability, time and death, fate.

I keep to myself, off to the side (like most people, I suppose). Sometimes, however, I imagine a painting at the center, central even to itself. These moments fuel my work, moments that represent the idea of a painting worthy of the work that created it. I imagine a work of art that, in navigating the divide between presence and absence, is able to keep me company. I feel this and I offer it to others.