Cityscapes and landscapes

Painting urban landscapes is, for me, a way to represent the men and women of my time. I have decided to approach this type of painting not as a mere aestheticism, as a form of art for art's sake, but to give it a documentary meaning both as a reflection of the society in which I live and of my personal experiences on trips to other cities in the world. I would like, in the way that Edward Hopper represented the Great Depression and the American society of his time, to be a painter of the crisis of my own country. The Argentine crisis has lasted as long as I can remember; They always told me about a rich country, but continually in crisis, with an increasingly impoverished population both materially, spiritually and culturally. Crisis after crisis, except with some pauses of economic prosperity, the country and society were left in a decline that no government was able to reverse. From this point of view, art becomes a means of documentation and personal resistance. Already in the 19th century, both Van Gogh and Gauguin began with the concept of art as personal resistance against a society from which they were excluded. I am too. Without a doubt, the work of the artist in a postmodern, globalized and crisis society is a work that can only be done in the margins. It is not possible to think of a central role for art and culture in a country that only privileges some forms of financial speculation. Even today it is no longer important to produce. If for the man of modernity, blinded by the myth of indefinite progress, work was the main computer of society, for the man of my time work no longer represents a criterion of order. Don't even think about art, which lives only in the margins and whose contribution becomes null in a society that travels somewhere, crossing the limbo of social networks, ignorance and indifference towards others. Poverty, which was once circumstantial, became permanent. The masses, no longer able to escape their condition of poverty, resign themselves to a life full of deprivation. But with poverty comes marginality; It is not a matter of romanticizing the poor either. In the poor there is the contradiction of injustice and the attack on the other, an attack that is born from the deepest marginalization. That is the society that I want to represent in my urban landscapes, the one that boasts the myth of a world power country, while it is immersed in the most absolute unease due to an increasingly complicated present. Art is nothing more than a documentation of what happens around me, of my experience in the midst of the society of my town, and of some cities in the world that I have visited. My experience is my way of approaching reality, of relating to that society in which solidarity becomes elusive, in which culture lives only on the margins. No one can be shown this painting simply because no one is interested. It is difficult for paint to change anything; But if it does not do so, there can be no change since it is not possible for a society like this to face its future. These are the contradictions that lead me to want to represent what surrounds me, urban life, of a machinery that constantly moves towards some totally uncertain part, and that is nothing more than the sum of all the individualities that are lost, not even knowing well to where.