As a merit to constancy

I am a barbarian, a foreigner: I cannot stand schools.

I am an illustrator, though I have also harbored, at different times, the ambitions of a painter—in oils—a craft I cultivated with vehemence, modestly emulating every well-painted and well-placed thing I saw. I was drawn especially to the works of the early post-war avant-gardes—Cubism and Metaphysical painting—and to anything that evoked the works, vices, and mannerisms of old Baroque painting.

The curious thing is that I never felt a true interest in the techniques or theories of color, nor in anything related to the subject. As a student at the School of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, I sought to flee the workshops. I would hide in “El Diamante,” an opaque and mournful relic of a bar that emitted its vaporous glow not far from the school. It sat on one of those streets inhabited by a band of neighborhood drunks, a few laborers (the school was not far from the port), and fugitive students like myself. That bar was my true school, my studio, my office, my library.

I drank coffee, smoked (Gitanes, when I could), and read novels, essays, and manifestos. I waited for my classmates to begin the kind of tertulia that always revolved around the same themes: Surrealism, Borges, Sábato, Cortázar, Alejandra Pizarnik, Freud, Lewis Carroll, Carl Jung, and the odd bit of something else. It was a circle of vicious evocation, for it took us years to broaden our tastes; I suppose that cramped and meager erudition was enough to exalt my friends, and it was enough for me—histrionic as we were—to feel ourselves, despite our anachronism and ignorance, part of the world and a little beyond the dull confines of El Diamante.

My pleasure lay there: in reasoning aloud. The school was the agora, the spontaneous and evocative conversation—sometimes inspired, other times foolish and snobbish—but it didn’t matter. I would return home with a swollen tongue, choked with ideas and ready to draw freely, to read, and sometimes to write improvised “novels.”

I am a barbarian, a foreigner; I cannot stand schools. I cannot stand study methods; programs disgust me. I had only one master in my life: the Argentine painter Roberto Aizenberg, who was himself a savage who did not even believe in Art History. Yet, he was a man who worked for hours and hours in his studio with self-denial and rigor. He painted with tidy austerity; he was an architect of the air, a Celestial Mind. He painted strange buildings and spiritual structures as if he were a Surrealist Monk who, in his cloister and cell, wove patient machines of the Otherworld. I would show up at his studio with my paintings and we would talk. We reasoned through our own manias, shared tastes and influences; that is to say, we held a tertulia. If there was any pedagogy, it was spontaneous and spoken, not without irony and jokes.

My career as a painter lasted but a short time: perhaps five years. Painting continuously displeased me. Holding one exhibition a year, formalizing a certain number of oil paintings (the only kind of painting I like), overwhelmed me. Every so often, I simply wanted to make a painting. But in reality, that activity was a reflection of my love for the painting done by others. The work of certain masters procures in me the desire to write about them or with them. When I observe paintings in a museum, I say things to myself: I dictate ideas, I meditate. I know that the visit will provide me with images, and those images will form part of a story or a chapter of a novel. That is: to create verba and reverberate through plastic form.

In the 90s, I lived in Barcelona. I worked as an illustrator for the newspaper El País for several years. I loved the atmosphere of the newsroom: all those people writing! It was a hive producing non-stop text. There were books on the desks, and circles, groups, and gathering spots all around. I spoke with the journalists—we discussed the article I was to illustrate; we improvised a micro-tertulia.

Illustration summarized my anxieties. In the newspaper office, I felt as I did in El Diamante: free to consume my style without academic restrictions but, at the same time, respecting a basic premise: an illustration published for thousands of readers must be comprehensible and accessible to everyone. It can be rare and original, but one must remember that they are preaching their interiority in the immense forum of press articles, combining current affairs and art in a tacit pact where the individual flows into the collective.

I am self-taught; I abandoned schools. I have no diplomas, but, dear reader, never follow in my footsteps. I mean to say that there are ways of living that choose us beyond prescribed models or modalities, and they are embraced, for better or worse, by accepting their consequences. We speak then of solitude: a solitary hybrid of disciplines to formalize a work that pushes us toward the world.

These days, I am writing a novel whose pages I am illustrating as I go (it has no name yet, and I warn the curious reader that it is not a “graphic novel,” as they call comic books for adults today). I believe each chapter will open, by way of introduction, with a drawing.

It is a novel dedicated to the Memento mori: the subject consists of the haste and urgency that writers or artists feel to win a work against time and death—as long as white pages, doubts, and abandonments do not intervene. As a merit to constancy and to face discouragement, we occasionally win the help of the Muses. In the novel (as in life), there gravitates over the characters the ability to recognize—if they are not obsessed with the success or failure of their work—and take advantage of that Visit.

The Memento mori and the Carpe diem admonish, in their own way, wasted time. We must seize occasions as if, in the weightlessness of the ephemeral, we could shine gloriously.

In that precariousness, I hope to finish my novel (I admit it has a baroque and fantastic bias) and, as the chapters progress, weave it like one who traces an anxious and strange labyrinth. Will the ruse be enough to lead Death astray and win a little more time?

As long as the Grim Reaper does not disguise herself as a Muse, I have hope

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