Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, artist: an exhibition between the history of Latin America and militancy

Art trails of yesterday and todaya sample of Adolfo Perez Esquivel which brings together drawings, paintings, prints and sculptures from 1950 to the present and offers a look at the culture and history of Latin America and the social concerns of the artist, human rights defender and Nobel Peace Prize winner, will open on July 2 next, at the Lucy Mattos Museum, in the Buenos Aires town of Béccar.

Postponed in March 2020 due to the pandemic, in this exhibition Pérez Esquivel (Buenos Aires, 1931) presents an outline of his prolific career in just over 30 works that express his thoughts in images captured in different stylistic searches, related to the future history and its dialogues, a possibility that arose with the invitation of the artist Lucy Mattos from the homonymous museum that houses her work.

On the ground floor of the building there are woodcuts, inks, watercolours, paintings and stone sculptures, patinated cement such as “Eclipse” (1969), an abstraction of human bodies held in the air; or “Paloma”, carved in carob; to the bronzes of a “Knight of the Apocalypse II” (1970) and “Homage to Kafka”.

In that tour that goes from his most recent acrylic paintings with a predominance of color, portraits and some surreal touch with the skeletons of the Mexican Guadalupe Posadas in “Death in love with life”, the Pachamama, women and migrants, La Boca, Caminito, before being a tourist site, “The Virgin of the cartoneros”, the Holocaust and the wait for the loved one in “The absent always present”, as a tribute to the Mothers.

“You know that life and death are the same thing: with death the doors of sensations and emotions close and the doors of the soul open. Death is in love with life. There is not one without the other. That is why this is a very surreal painting”, he explains about the image where death gives life a rose and recalls the cult of the dead and Posadas.

On the other hand, in “Refugees”, he scatters the faces of migrants he met on his travels, including to the island of Lesbos (Greece), who “go out to look for a horizon of life and do not find it”, he explains and affirms: “the Refugees are a drama, not only in Ukraine -he clarifies and reels critically-, Syria, Libya, the Middle East, Palestine”.

Some of the paintings are close to Christian and ecumenical values, perhaps inspired by his Franciscan training, which calls him with greater force since the 70s and in his work with the Service, Peace and Justice (Serpaj), for example, which refer to those graphic narrations used to transmit the evangelizing “word” but which, from the contemporary point of view of Pérez Esquivel, question the realities of Latin America, its history, and various memories of the subjugated peoples.

These narratives are also based on the homage to women in “Mural de la madre tierra” (2012) -whose original is in Curitiba, Brazil-, because as stated “women are making an extraordinary, non-violent cultural rebellion in the world , something unprecedented”, he says, admiring this “century of women” as he defines it, and perhaps, where he pins part of his hopes on humanity. Thus, his gaze on women is turned and vindicated in a new work in progress where he takes up “The Last Supper” by Leonardo da Vinci.

“I don’t think there were no women at the last supper,” he says, bringing the idea of ​​erasing the figure of Mary Magdalene, for which he installs “Mary the Mother and Mary Magdalene” in his work, and accompanies them with “contemporary apostles , people who walked with me through Latin America, many have died, most of those I represent, but there are Angelelli, Jaime Nevares, Perico Pérez Aguirre”, he lists.

Why go back to that image of the Last Supper? “There is a hope”, he explains, “Jesus is sharing bread, it is not death (but) it is the sharing of bread and freedom”.

“It seems to me that we don’t always have to present tragedy for tragedy’s sake, but despite it, there is also hope that ‘another world is possible,'” he repeats the motto of the Porto Alegre World Social Forum in which he participated. If not, we would not be working. If we stay in the tragedy, in the existence that everything is lost, there is no possibility of change”, she reflects. And he adds: “If we have the ability to unite, to build, to look at life from another place despite the tragedy, it is possible.”

His works also lead him to explore the intimacy of the portrait such as that of his wife Amanda Guerreño, his life partner -the composer who premieres her opera ‘La mujer sin nombre’ at the CCK on July 9- and is present in one of his large canvases, “Resurrection”, a copy of the original and part of the set of those 15 cloths of the “Latin American Way of the Cross” (1992) that commemorate the 500th anniversary of the conquest, commissioned from the artist within the framework of the German Episcopal Conference.

There is “the history of America, the conquerors who massacred the original populations, Christ, the peasant marches, Tupac Amaru, the Virgin, the street children, Monseñor Romero, Chico Mendez, Angelelli, Las Madres, the corn farmers and the Pachamama, the ruin of Machu Picchu as a symbol of America -the tragedy but also the resurrection of the peoples-, the contamination, the door of the sun in Tiahuanaco, a machi with the kultrún”, he enumerates and details smilingly and adds that ” in the murals it is usually Amanda”.

Organized chronologically by the art critic and journalist Laura Casanovas, a journey through different periods is outlined, intertwining artistic expression, militancy for human rights, and the social and aesthetic situation that mark the temporality of her work.

Although he has not exhibited his works for 50 years, they are present in different European countries such as the Monument to Refugees at the UNHCR headquarters in Switzerland or in Barcelona the tribute to Gandhi, in Japan, among other countries. And in Spain there is the complex installed in Combarro, the town of his father in Galicia, whose “lightest stone weighs 10 tons”.

The exhibition brings closer that less visible facet of the constant and daily work of the artist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980, in the midst of a civic-military dictatorship, a former political prisoner for 14 months (1977-1978) who was saved from being thrown into the river on one of the death flights and was dismissed from his teaching positions.

Trained in Fine Arts at the Manuel Belgrano School of Artistic Education and at the University of La Plata, with several honorary doctorates, at 90 years of age, he continues his teaching work focused on human rights, without having lost sight of the artistic, according to it states.

“I want to tell the story of Latin America. First I am an artist, then a militant. The two things merge, all my art has to do with life, with what I do and I think that’s important”, he states in the curatorial text.

As an expressive search for what he wants to communicate, because the didactic is one of his characteristics, there are the drawings made in Iraq.

In “Bagdad” (2001), he portrays Ayamira, the mother who loses her children, because she was an observer of the destruction of a shelter with 600 children that, according to the media, had another destination bombed by NATO. Images appeared instead of words this time. But that shadow refers to that other tragedy, that of Hiroshima that he recounts in his book “The Other Look” (2021).

How do you deal with these experiences? “Sometimes I solve it with drawings and other times I write. Writing, art, drawing, for me is a whole language. I don’t make differences. Sometimes it is more convenient for me to draw it as this matter of children is visualized in another way and other times I have the need to write”, she explains.

Pérez Esquivel’s plastic work “is not a reflection of his concerns”, the curator points out, but rather “is autonomous and speaks for itself in that interweaving between visual language and his commitment to issues of humanity”.

Among the themes are his memories of “Candombe” (2017) from his childhood in San Telmo when the neighbors sat on the sidewalk with their beer or grappa to watch the descendants of slaves dance, the “morenos”, those who did not they were called “black”, clarifies the artist who learned from his maternal grandmother Eugenia the wisdom of his Guarani ancestry.

His interest in urban agglomerations also appears in volumes that take on presence in his earliest inks such as “Espacio porteño” (1950) or “Metamorfosis del conductor” (1970) or “Journey by bus (1970), an amalgamation of bodies ; and the woodcuts mark an interesting moment with “Hiroshima” (1981), or “Perón o muerte” and “Dale flaco” from 1980.

*The exhibition can be visited until October 16, at Avenida Del Libertador 17426, Béccar, San Isidro, from Wednesday to Saturday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and on Sundays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Source: Telam

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