A blank canvas, a brush, a palette, and a hand; that’s what it’s all about. Imagining tradition, recreating it with every stroke. Reviving the Homeland. Because the Homeland is the landscape of our early years, where our most intimate dreams nestle, the one that kicks the «pata» and rides bareback on our first horses. Those horses, whose every minute detail of their coats, the type of gallop, and the proud look of our parents as they saw us children, very young, straddling their backs, are etched into our memory.
A long line of artists preceded them in this task, brush in hand. Names that come from the depths of time: Essex Vidal, Rugendas, Carlos Morel, Palliére, Carlos Pellegrini Sr., and Prilidiano Pueyrredón were among the first. The Uruguayan Blanes followed, and in this century, Jorge Campos and Cupertino del Campo made their appearance. In turn, Florencio Molina Campos created a whole caricature style in the «Alpargatas» calendars. Pencil in hand, Eleodoro Marenco imagined a thousand scenes and illustrated the old classics of frontier literature. Meanwhile, in national comics, the drawings of Enrique Rapela, Magallanes, Juan Arancio, Roume, or «chingolo» Casalla filled tens of thousands of panels with the adventures of unforgettable characters. More recent, but no less important for the beauty of their colorful rural strokes, are the recently deceased Rodolfo Ramos, Julián Althabe, and Gustavo Solari.
Each and every one of them tried to visualize and energize the typical scenes of the Argentine countryside and its historical evolution. Their art is a chronicle that captures the very roots of tradition. Today, the work of the early artists is an invaluable source for historiographical research because they were direct witnesses of that time of open-chest clashes, cavalry charges with lances at the ready, endless journeys under the gentle track of oxcarts, malones lording over captives and settlements, and thirst quenched at old «esquinas» while a surera guitar purred.
Because that’s what it’s about: rescuing with a burst of colors the stories of our tradition that were told around the mate gourds of yesteryear, when it was the time of listening, which prefers the soft penumbra to the wild explosion of light. The enchanted murmur of words mingling with the dance of flames imprinted on the speaker’s face. The old countryman who, with only the echo of his voice, sometimes aided by a guitar of elemental notes, unraveled the Creole events of the past.
And there is the painter. Blowing on those ancient embers, brush in hand. Feeling in his own flesh the heartbeat of those sounds, and putting body and soul into every stroke. Filling his eyes with landscape, portraying the juicy green of the fields and the boundless blue of the skies. The tonalities cover the canvas, shadow after shadow, line after line; imprinting on it the diverse geographies of the Homeland: jungle, salt flat, marsh, desert, valley, sea, plain, mountain, and river are outlined, forming the landscapes of all Argentina.
The human color is provided by the gaucho of today and always, his «china,» his dogs, and his ranch, and the sturdy figure of the Indian of yesteryear, wrapped in his exquisite poncho and accompanied by his superb mount. Everything pulses and beats on the canvas; it even seems that the silhouette breathes and smells, that it blinks when feeling the lash of the wind on its face, that it hears, like a sigh, the sound of a distant cowbell, or that it breaks into a gentle gallop toward the infinite vastness of the horizon.
The painting is now complete; the appointment is in July in San Isidro, at the Espacio Cultural Marín. The event is very important, almost transcendental, because never before have so many valuable works and so many costumbrista artists been gathered under one roof. It is very likely that in the future, the significance achieved by this exhibition will be spoken of, because in these oils one feels the heartbeat of our blood. There are nine painters, and let them come in, because it is the Homeland that awaits them.
Archaeologist and writer. The exhibition Pinceladas de la Patria will take place from the 8th to the 22nd of this month, at Espacio Cultural Marín, Av. del Libertador 17,115, Beccar.
Para mí esto es lo único que merece llamarse cultura, no las pavadas progre que nos quieren meter. Pintura gaucha, tradición, patria… eso sí es argentino de verdad. Vayan antes que los zurdos lo cancelen. ¡Viva la patria, carajo! Firmado: Gauchito_MST
para mi esto es otra muestra de arte pa blancos chetos q nunca pisaron el campo mientras los laburantes se rompen el lomo estos artistas se llenan de guita romantizando la miseria puro verso vendido firmado el che gaucho