04/17/2020
Extracts from the "Intimismos" curatorial text by Laura Ojeda Bär
"After the emergence of the avant-garde movements of the beginning of the twentieth century, art history finally came to consider the idea of the artistic genius to be outdated and that of the artist-worker was established. Genre painting—scenes of daily life, landscapes, still lifes, portraits—among many other pictorial forms was irreversibly changed. As workers themselves, artists were no longer observers of other people’s habits and lives; instead, their own lives, their own everydayness came into play because it was the same as that of those who would observe their work.
In this case - Intimismos - the paintings take as their source a graphic wellspring that swells larger day after day—producing new iterations within that daily repetition—seeking out situations that dissolve into our collective experience without losing their individual specificity.
Octavio and Franco were born in Argentina where they took their first steps as artists. They’ve lived abroad for years, a strategic, work-related, and emotional relocation. Throughout the years, their works have dealt with different themes. In “Intimismos” they intersect: the works presented in this show were born under the sign of the cell-phone camera lens.
As these are intimate images from the everyday lives of both artists, it is not unusual that they have chosen techniques with which they feel at home: Franco, his papers, oils, and metallic structures; Octavio, his acrylics. Their formal decisions are not up for discussion; they are those necessary for them to feel comfortable and able to focus on the choice of which specific instances of their daily flow are those that contain the greatest intensity. Thus, they show us scenes of solitude and moments of being in society.
Both artists make permanent that which is fleeting that keeps us all company day after day, that series of images that flow before us and remind us of the scrolling of social media; each image functions like a star within a constellation—at once shining and twinkling, unique and individual, but that acquires its real weight in relation to the rest."
