VIK - Artists

Pablo Atchugarry

Living Room ~ South Light ~ Sculpture in Carrara Statuary white marble

Atchugarry deals with volume and space. The clefts, the perforations on marble are the zones where space flows, time flows… the winds of history travel freely, going through and caressing these surfaces which, at times, are close to the skin, the silk, the smoothness of river water, the plumage of the heron. The impossible light stone fantasy of the sculptures materializes in the hands of our artist. An important piece of white marble was chosen for Estancia Vik and the resulting sculpture was placed precisely at the center of the architecture, the place where the geographical energies of the North to South and the East to West axes intersect. It is at this point where the palette of colors becomes the sole color: white, the colour of excellence, purity, light, perfection, the beginning, the cloud. Metaphorically speaking, the sculpture is the axis of the estancia, the pivot on which the symphony of spaces, colors, perspectives and works of art rotate and energize.
Enrique Badaró ~ 2008

Bio – Pablo Atchugarry was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, on August 23, 1954. His first individual exhibition took place at the Civic Salon of Montevideo in 1972. Two years later, his first international exhibition was held in Buenos Aires. By the end of the seventies, he had completed study trips to France, Spain and finally Italy, where he carried out his first individual exhibition in Lecco in 1978. In the following years, he found himself fascinated by marble and produced his first Carrara sculpture, “La Lumière”. For his first commission of a large sculpture, “La Pietà”, in 1982, he settled down in Lecco. In January 2007, the Pablo Atchugarry Foundation and Workshop was inaugurated, in Manantiales, Uruguay.

Alvaro Amengal

Amengual Suite ~ The hours ~ Oil on wood ~ Bas relief in ceramics

Alvaro Amengual developed three large pictorial focal points for his suite. He created a vision that goes from a curious proximity which is necessary to observe the birds, to close ups of local flowers, carried it with a delicate and, at the same, expressive technique, allowing the subject matter of the painting to acquire its own personality.

A second pictorial group is a tidy frieze in which the landscape of Estancia Vik is masterfully realized and the transformation of light can be observed from sunrise to sunset. It is an almost theatrical transformation: the blushes of dawn pave the way for the exultation of midday light, and the afternoon and evening sun transmit that slow decline into the hours of rest and mystery.

The third of the group is the big sky, arguably, the protagonist of the Uruguayan country landscape. Amengual handles his matter firmly and sensually, communicating with the greatness and meticulousness of an explorer from distant lands.
Enrique Badaró ~ 2008

Bio – Álvaro Amengual was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1957. He has a long artistic career and has developed teaching activities in his atelier as well as in institutions of national prestige. He was awarded the B´nai B´rit prize for his career in 2007.

Enrique Badaró

Carlos Barea

Barea Suite ~ The landscape of the thought ~ Acrylic painting and graphic techniques on canvas ~ Acrylic painting and graphic techniques on wood (cedrillo)

Carlos Barea generates a dialogue between paint and canvas. It’s a personal iconography that he describes with allusions to music, to minimalism, to the pre-Colombian period. In his work, Runic symbols interact with images from the local landscape and the emblematic monogram of the Vik family. Barea includes mythological creatures that populate history and the fables of many cultures but also belong to the fauna, which identifies the Uruguayan prairie.

Furthermore, a painting on wood adopts the Uruguayan architecture. Barea takes inspiration from the landscape of the magical country situated to the north on the coast of José Ignacio, creating an almost cinematographic vision, with a close up of low vegetation, grass, strands, and straw (treated in an oriental way).

Intense colours provide Barea’s creation with a vibrant presence, in the tones of the estancia from which dawn and nature’s awakenings are apparent. A warm palette covers most of the work, whereas on the top, the interplay of cold colours reflects water ~ the river and lagoon, and then the sky.
Enrique Badaró ~ 2008

Bio ~ Carlos Barea was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1954. He has had innumerable collective and individual exhibitions over his long and meaningful artistic career. Barea has worked as a designer and has considerable experience as an art teacher in prestigious national institutions. In 1991, he exhibited a series called Romans at IMF Atrium, Washington DC, and in 1997, he obtained the Intercampus Scholarship, Pictorial Proceedings, granted by the University of Barcelona.

Marcelo Betancourt

Gloria Boxer

Eduardo Cardozo

Cardozo Suite ~ uncertain Horizon ~ Pictorial mixed techniques ~ Graphs on wall ~ Assembling of objects

For Eduardo Cardozo, the canvas is the wall creating a link from the work in his suite to a remote past. Our ancestors, sunk in the darkness of time, used the rigid surfaces of rocks and natural walls for painting, decorating with graffiti, sketching bas-reliefs, sculptural intentions, graphs full of mystery, allusions, and sometimes realistic, other times abstract. Rock, as rigid surface, rules the aesthetics of this captivating past. Eduardo Cardozo suggests an adventure in this sense. His work does eliminate the canvas; walls are the base and the work itself. Materials are layered and thicken, sinking deeply into the undulating surfaces. Plaster and the suggestive and seductive layering of paint, of colour, melt into the collage with fragments of mosaics.

Everything is flooded with natural colour. The soft ocher is typical of Cardozo. The wooden “piques”, either square or circular, flow from the walls like shouts from the past. The materials rub against each other, illustrating the dramas of nature, the telluric. A stone “pique” is beautiful as the old things, with its lichens on it, allowing us to appreciate the refined vision of a peculiar creator.

The tones and semitones of the grey stone, with its greyish green, are reminiscent of oriental concepts of beauty that constitute the “rojaku” principle, that bittersweet feeling of quiet beauty that we perceive when we find life in a flower, a vegetable, a lichen coming from a dead surface or body; life pouring from the lifeless.

At the same time, this stone connects us with human activity. The stone “pique” was used to set land limits with wire fences. Nowadays, it seems old fashioned. In other times, perhaps, it was the novelty created by the beautiful walls of accumulated stone, which shaped the lithic frontiers of the rural regions.

To be in the suite where Eduardo Cardozo was working is to be in one of his works. The flat works turn into a habitable space, full of palimpsests without letters or signs. The superposed shapes and materials help us to perceive the soul of an artist who developed his language in the city, though his childhood belongs to the imperishable horizon of the country. Enrique Badaró ~ 2008

Bio ~ Eduardo Cardozo was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1965. He graduated from the National School of Fine Arts (Ernesto Aroztegui workshop). Then attended the University of Architecture. He studied engraving with Luis Camnitzer and carried out individual exhibitions at Del Notariado Gallery, the Exhibition Centre of the Municipal government of Montevideo, the French Alliance, The Blanes Museum, the Uruguay-United States Alliance, the Engelman-Ost space, the Central Station(AFE), Montevideo subway, the Mars Gallery, the South Gallery, the Goethe- Institute.

Marcelo Daglio

Since he graduated up until now, Marcelo Daglio has developed his projects and ideas from his study as an independent architect, located in the city of Montevideo, Uruguay. He developed multiplicity architectonic programs: Commercial locals, hotelier, gastronomy, but his architectonic personality emphasizes in his construction of sumptuous particular residences. Most of his residential main projects were realized in Uruguay, outstanding in particular are the ones realized in Punta Del Este.

The personality and the cast of his architecture has permitted architect Daglio to produce many projects and the constructions of them in foreign countries such as: Buenos Aires Province, Argentine Republic, in the city of Asuncion, Paraguay Republic. In 2001 by invitation he had the possibility of developing a series of projects of sumptuous residences in Windemere, in the island of Eleuthera, Bahamas, producing the construction of two of his projects in 2002. In 2002 he is also invited to realize a renovation of an apartment in Manhattan, in the city of New York, finishing this renovation in 2003. In 2004, he presents a renovation for a hotel in the historic center of the city of Maranello, in Modena, Italy, which is in the process of approbation to begin the construction.

Bio
Marcel Daglio was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, the 18th of May, 1957. He graduated from the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Uruguay in 1988.

Agueda Di Cancro

South Garden ~ Horizon ~ Glass techniques ~ Enamel work on glass

Through her glass works, Águeda di Cancro transports us to a world close to water, a world of transparencies that liquate space. Her work is located in the South Garden, the swimming pool area which metaphorically opens and refers to the ocean, the sea, the lagoon, the stream, and the fresh air from the south, originating in a dreamlike Antarctica, thousands of miles away.

With her feminine sensibility and smoothness, Águeda offers us a fine mural, a delicate part of the architecture that accompanies the powerful horizon of the landscape full of sky, of birds, of open air. Roots and wings form the key elements of Águeda’s work. The architectural installation references these roots, material that clings to the soil, to the ground, while glass flies speak of lightness, of fragility, of winged beauty.

In the blue glass of the work, Águeda includes subtle textures and fine jewelled wires, masterfully woven and set. Air bubbles that generate diaphanous worlds allow us to understand the whole of the universe in a unique and lonely point. As a unit, these worlds form an intensely peculiar assemblage.

Furthermore, the use of enamel as stain ~ the tachisme technique ~ explodes with irrepressible power. Blue colors drip freely, disseminate, and dominate the transparency of glass, ruling the colour palate. Águeda incorporates orange in warm watercolor-like touches of paint and beautiful transparent symbols.

The small glass fragments remind us of the explosion of waves crashing against ocean rocks while at the same time, this piece with its horizontal and liquid writing along the retaining walls, embraces the South Patio and like outstretched arms, offers peace and an incoming breath of the intense air of the Uruguayan east. Enrique Badaró ~ 2008

Bio ~ Agueda di Cancro was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. After being awarded a scholarship in Mexico, she devoted herself to glass sculpture. She held an individual exhibition at the National School of Plastic Arts, Mexico, in 1965. Art Friends, Montevideo, 1970, 1971; Gallery of the Body of Notaries, 1972; French Alliance, 1976; Karen Gugelmeier, 1982; Museum of Contemporary Art, 1983, 1989; Uruguay-United States Cultural Alliance, 1986, 1995; Art and Communication Centre, Buenos Aires, 1988; Municipal Subway, 1989; Art Museum of Maldonado, 1992; Italo-Latinamerican Institute, Rome, 1994; Torres García Museum, 1995; Buquebús Foundation, 1998.

Lacy Duarte

Lacy Duarte Suite ~ Territories ~ Textile techniques, collage, needlework, embroidery

Lacy Duarte created an assemblage of puppets carved in ceibo wood, small silver sculptures, stones and textiles on a carpenter’s bench and a large canvas plane, treated with paints using local techniques, such as mud, and vegetable textures.

Duarte holds on to an intensely rural past. Her memories from childhood and early youth ~ when toys were made by her mother who would carve on ceibo wood ~ and the elemental materials ~ mud, wool, animal blood ~ have strongly influenced the aesthetic view of this prolific Uruguayan artist. Following her mother’s teaching by carving them in wood, Duarte decorates warm regions of the room with small characters, like archaic figures inhabiting the space.

Her education started in an academic way when she took lessons from a Hungarian teacher of painting. Long after that, she travelled the great international centers of art in Europe and the United States. She then returned home to follow her belief that as an artist, she was meant to explore her deepest roots: her bond with the Uruguayan countryside.

>The ‘traperas’ or rags ~ emblematic elements in Duarte’s work ~ evoke this misunderstood and magical world of country life. The ‘trapera’ is an everyday object used to cover, to protect from the cold. It is a symbol of emotional protection from the forces of an immense and generous nature.

Her choice of colors is related to the traditional palettes of everyday life in the country. The wooden tones, brown and beige, generate an intensely telluric and natural atmosphere that is deeply rooted in the objects and the simple inhabitants of the rich land.

Duarte focuses on the tiny beings: insects, the little representatives of a forgotten landscape. Silver and stone butterflies float from above; larval creatures that bravely perform the miracle of life in silence. They are a metal and silk whisper protecting the traveler’s sleep. Enrique Badaró ~ 2008

Bio ~ Lacy Duarte was born in Salto, Uruguay. She has a vast artistic career in Uruguay and abroad, having carried out innumerable individual exhibitions and received important prizes and awards. In 2006, Duarte represented Uruguay at the Venice Biennale.

Clever Lara

Living Room ~ Veils ~ Oil on canvas

Clever Lara has created a spectacular landscape through which we see on the ceiling what we are contemplating from the sky. Actually, Lara’s first experience on this land was his perception of it from the air, flying over the magnificent fields that encompass José Ignacio lagoon and its surroundings.

In his paintings, Lara illuminates the process of creation and re-creation and through visual information discusses what his land and its coast represent. But in his depiction, Lara adds strange elements to the landscape. These elements ~ simple jewels, marbles, shells, small paper planes, cotton clouds ~ mark important places with subtle precaution. The tension between the non-diegetic pieces and the realism of the Uruguayan coast communicates a unique vibration.

Two systems interact on Lara’s inverted plan and a subtle veil generates a center of radial attention. He is playing with the evocations of nautical ropes for tying: the bond with the land, his land, with the sea and with the sky.

Chromatically, Lara dives into the world of colors that rules the center of Estancia Vik. With gradual and delicate harmony, he moves from one colour pallet to the other. The southern zone is blue and reflects the freshness of the ocean, the lagoon and the stream. The eastern zone is in warm reds indicating the energetic break of dawn and the fascination, the new choices of a day beginning. Browns and greys characterize the west, which represents the end of the day, when peace and quiet cover the whole space. Towards the north, greens remind us of prairies that spread out infinitely, with continental evocations.

Lara builds, likewise, two big lateral friezes, not as the landscapes seen from the air, but as boxes or niches within which we discover our coastal icons ~ light-houses, beaches, rocks, cities, towns. Like an Ionian frieze that surrounds the interior of the Greek temples, this master of Uruguayan art makes us face the pleasure of watching/perceiving a singular land and landscape: the exciting world of the Uruguayan coast.

Oil on canvas was his technical choice. In classical terms, to Lara it represents the pleasure of painting in its true greatness. The composition, confident and firm, gives us this monumental pictorial presence that exalts our stay in the central space of the estancia. Enrique Badaró ~ 2008

Bio ~ Clever Lara was born in Rivera on November 26, 1952. Between 1966 and 1972, he studied at Edgardo Ribeiro´s atelier. In 1984, having the support of a Guggenheim scholarship, he studied engraving in metals at Pratt Graphics Center in New York and with Luis Camnitzer in Valdottavo, Lucca, Italy. He has exhibited individually in Rivera, Montevideo, Santiago de Chile, Lima, Buenos Aires and New York. He was a member of the official delegation to the Biennial of San Pablo on two occasions and to the Biennial of Venice in 1986. Later, he was the curator and the authority in charge of selecting the artists for these events.

Marcelo Legrand

Barbecue ~ Polymeric paintings on metal, paintbrush and roller

At Estancia Vik and throughout Uruguay, the barbecue is a space of strength, of nutritional pleasure. It’s the place of the first meetings around the fire where a group of human beings roast the original meat then nourish themselves around tables of irregular indigenous wood. In the Estancia’s Barbeque, this tradition is contrasted and complimented by Legrand’s geometrical and metallic structure. The structure of his art eliminates shape. The frame of the Barbeque is corrugated metal sheeting, which joins above with the metal roofing of the estancia tying the space that covers and protects all the architecture with the space that feeds and nourishes its inhabitants.

To decorate the walls, Legrand chose wild colors. He begins intuitively with the stain, the surly brush stroke, violent at times. Gradually, slowly, in a subtle and smooth way, through careful thought, these colors interact and form a structure. From this mythical genesis, out of chaos, an organized abstract composition with clear centers of interest materializes, never obfuscating the presence of metal.

Master Suite Legrand ~ The backing of dreams ~ Collage on paper ~ Paper treated with paints and tints
Inclusion of wood in stone

Marcelo Legrand discovers and explores a personal world. The observer immerses himself in a somewhat oriental aesthetic concept. The translucent paper of fragile nature enhances and at the same time, is enhanced by its complementary opposites of angles, straight lines in primary materials, irradiators of pure elemental energy. Everything is balanced. The imaginative turns into the real.

Legrand uses several highly attractive elements that generate different visual zones. He stirs up questions. The surprise element is just a cliché to attract the spectator, the occasional guest, naturally, towards the atmosphere of the suite’s installation. The ambient light disseminates through the walls interacting with the luminous bodies, thus achieving different ambiances at day and night.

Taking a diagonal approach to the suite, translucent art paper is the majestic vertical background of the bed. Near the center of the room, in the air, a luminous artifact of deconstructive architecture hangs. A powerful front view of the stove, implacably sculptural, in stone and wood, puts the finishing touch to this first diagonal of the suite. These elements interact, with refined subtlety. Thus the observer gets into a white weft on the natural sheer quality of the paper; or the other one, where black behaves as a complementary proposal.

The box sculpture is an aesthetic discovery of the highest artistic value. It involves the use of metaphors that refer to classificatory accumulation. They remind us of a library of visual works, a geometrical encyclopedia of lamps, of rectangles, of prisms. Together with the main chandelier, transparency plays an important role. Light runs through the surfaces. There is an allusion to vitreaux art, to the interaction of colored glass, but, of course, the material is paper, not glass. Color becomes transparent because it is present on both sides of the paper, in both middle and full tones. There is a dialogue among refinement, subtlety and powerful sculptural strength. Everything reverberates in unison.

Legrand reaches a space of visual poetry. An atmosphere especially designed for relaxation and contemplation. A searcher with a clear vision of the whole artistic set, for a special space, in a very special place. Enrique Badaró ~ 2008

Bio ~ Marcelo Legrand was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1961. Between 1977 and 1982, he studied with Héctor Sgarbi at the Circle of Fine Arts in Montevideo. In 1986, he studied engraving with David Finkbeiner from the University of New York at the Purchase College.
He studied the art of making paper with Laurence Barker (Head of Barcelona Paper Horlkshep), at the Museum of Plastic and Visual Arts, in Montevideo. Luis Camnitzer gave him a scholarship to study engraving on metal in Lucca, Italy.

Hugo Longa

(1934 – 1994)

1934: Born in Guaviyú de Arapey, in the department of Salto. As an artist he began exhibiting since 1966. His work reflects a peculiar color imaginative and carefree. Among its series highlights collages Auschwitz created between 1967 and 1976, reflected objects, assemblages and collages which explore imaginary worlds, the fabulous and magic, with shares of Surrealism and Pop Art. He embodied the improbable and grotesque in painting and the aforementioned techniques, showing a strong sense of humor, exploring certain human perspectives and diving into the unconscious realities. The neo-expressionist paintings created from the eighties are inviting the density of matter, violent pincelados in multiple directions, altered relationships of scale, the overwhelming chromaticism, the blasted and vehement stains, and iconography aggressive.

The teaching career of Hugo Longa was very important; many of his students are in the group of young artists of the current Uruguay.

Carlos Musso

Chapel ~ Diverse paintings: oil, acrylic, vinyl, on mud and wood, including bronze and mud techniques

More a spiritual set than a religious place, the Musso Chapel is a peculiar space. It is a space of subtle and superb architecture within a natural environment. The diagonals created by an island of ombu trees have determined its location, which is filled with the intuitive energies of nature. Stone slabs, trees, and free space support the structure with the dignity and simplicity of indigenous colors and textures of the Uruguayan country. From its volumetric exterior, the Chapel mimics the shape men and birds, the gaucho and the baker bird, of our country work within: their houses and hearths. As the door hinges turn and the heavy Romanesque doors open, the surprise effect begins. The doors with golden colors of bronze, like a medieval retable, lead to a highly colorful, protective, concave space where circles of colored light are jewels in the wall. Musso dazzles us with his colorful interior. Through the landscape, diagonals and straight lines of the natural surroundings extend for hundreds of meters until they intersect at a distant and majestic eucalyptus; similarly the lines of the landscape converge at the Chapel where daylight penetrates through these chromicized perforations in the hemispherical wall.

Musso’s painting overflows. Here, there are no traces of religion and, yet, there are symbols of all of them. There are hints of the diverse spirituality of this global world. Above all, there is a communion, with God or with ourselves; there is a moment of peace, of elevation, no matter what faith it belongs to that unique space is present.

The geometrical, like in Byzantine drawings, Mozarabics or variations of blue from the Renaissance, Musso offers us a heart, a skeleton that vaguely protects it, maybe enabling the observer to identify ~ from the depths and folds of the soul ~ with this organic and respectful space. Just like each one of us, this Chapel is an unrepeatable identity that shines through with intimacy and reflection while watched over by the incomprehensible forces of the universal order. It is a jewel in the middle of the country.

In the construction of this work, Musso was supported by experts specialized in mud and natural materials.

Musso Suite ~ Felisberto ~ Acrylic painting, oil painting, plastic painting on “cedrillo” panels

Carlos Musso produces works of highly visual seduction without neglecting their conceptual value. As an artist with an important theoretical education, Musso travels paths where eroticism, sensuality, violence and the oneiric are scrutinized. His passion for liturgical medieval art, for the Roman/Pompeian fresco, for the Viennese secession, in particular for the work of Gustav Klimt is present in this work

Musso approaches his suite as if it was the narration of the villa dei misteri in Pompeii. His fresco narrates a story of passion: a wedding, the theatre, and the characters who observe us from a volcanic past and include the viewer in their personal history. Simultaneously, the characters and the aesthetics are contemporary, international yet uniquely Uruguayan

Women in sensual postures, always delicate, disturb with their suggestive presence. The artist at the piano ~ a metaphor for all artists ~ finds himself between anguish and the pleasure of creation. The details ~ the still life’s, the birds ~ refer to the Roman wall painting. Elements that were originally thought of as ornaments, in fact are loaded with an inviting polysemy.

Musso leaves fragments of wood, which will begin to rust and transform through infinite colorations, especially when viewed in interaction with the painted surfaces. Another remarkable aspect of coloration in his work is in the zoning of clashing colors, particularly in contrast with the plain surfaces. Here large chromatic planes defuse the exuberant centers of attention.

Finally, we should highlight the presence of the ornamental “guarda”. Musso’s studies on the geometrical composition that constitute “guardas” ~ ornamental elements on floors and skirting boards, walls, arcades that were prevalent in the middle ages and in Arabian/Muslim art ~ enrich this potent work by one of the most prolific artists in the current Uruguayan art scene.
Enrique Badaró ~ 2008

Bio ~ Carlos Musso was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1954. Painter, installation and graphic artist, as well as set designer, Musso has carried out numerous individual and collective exhibitions of his work. He has worked as a teacher in prestigious national institutions. In 2002, he received the Figari award for his professional career.

Ricardo Pascale

West Patio ~ Tramonto ~ Wooden sculptures

Ricardo Pascale is a remarkable sculptor. His sculptures reside in the West Patio, a space that conjures images of the end of the day, colors of the ground, bittersweet nostalgia that come with the culmination of a great day. His works have an easy-going nature with a specific taste, strength and tenderness that transforms gracefully for either exterior or the interior spaces.

It is no surprise that wood is his sole material. His works are guided by the concept that delight comes from wooden surfaces. The luster of the original tree, its aging process and the story inscribed on its veins and interstices, provide his monumental objects with a unique personality.

In his sculptural immobility, Pascale plays, however, with a highly dynamic concept. Thus, the set of three pieces refer to birth, growth, and the transformation of an unfinished work that is about to be born or to be buried. The pieces open up like the wings of the birds looking for cosmic energy, giving the sculptural set its very special dynamic.

Pascale is not only a refined, intuitive creator of shapes suggested by wood but also an artist with a strict geometrical sense, a sound knowledge of mathematics, of secret movement, of the language of the universe ~ skills that help him organize his shapes and his actions. Pascale understands the rules of universal structure perfectly. Enrique Badaró ~ 2008

Bio ~ Ricardo Pascale is Uruguayan. He began to study drawing and painting in his childhood. Some years later, in his adulthood, he studied at the Nelson Ramos Workshop. He represented Uruguay in the Biennial of Venice in 1999. His works are exhibited in several American and European museums and form numerous private collections. Some of his works are at the main entrance of the United Nations Headquarters in New York; in the Hall of the Library of Alexandria (Egypt); in the gardens of Sanssouci, Potsda, Germany; at the front of the Uruguayan Embassy, in Washington DC, USA, at the Uruguay de Lima Park, Peru; in the gardens of Ca’Foscari in Venice, Italy; at the historical Bastión del Carmen in Colonia, Uruguay, among other places.

José Pelayo

East Patio ~ Indian Tent ~ Wood with metal inserts ~ Enamel painting

Jose Pelayo is interested in the power of wood. In Uruguay, art history has been abundant in wood works: sculptors, wood engravers, and woodworkers. Renowned names —Francisco Matto, Germán Cabrera, Joaquín Torres García ~ have strengthened their ties with wood, approaching it from different angles. Pelayo in his unique way, deals with exterior polychromatic wood sculpture ~ but there is something lucid in it; it is articulate: metallic axes, screws interfere with it. In the refinement of heavy wood, the pieces appear almost ethereal. A foot, a strong and light piece of wood, holds one of the laterals; a triangle hangs playfully, dominated by the forces of wind and the whims of the weather.

In the East Patio where red strengthens the forces of daybreak, Pelayo seduces us with an exquisite sculptural piece, which refers to his interior mural, though this one spreads out clearly on the wall. The piece resembles the elegance of a Greek column, the power of a Totem Pole, the primitive aspect of a perishable architectural structure, the color of blood and ritual. Pelayo moves us again while winking at our own art history.

Game Room ~ Wooden assemblage ~ Mixed materials on woods

Pelayo has not brought any new elements to his creation; instead he has used only materials discarded from buildings under construction. The environment was already there, similar in a sense to the circumstances of a countryman who has his own architecture and makes his own utensils with the natural elements that surround him: pieces of wood, boards, old rods, metallic doors, plank molding leftovers…
All that is usually disposed of is given a new meaning by Pelayo providing it with a renewed projection, in a new and sagacious way. Large surfaces are intersected by planes and crowded with small wooden wedges. A plethora of triangles build hideouts between the strong lines of the wood. The supporting and organizing structure with its ordered horizontal boards is the wooden wall. Rhythmically placed the horizontal boards of the walls are blended with the original architecture; Pelayo respects it and decides to incorporate it. In his general conception, a huge bow and arrow constitute his spectacular mural.

The natural colors of wood ~ rusty red, varieties of white, of black and a contrasting blue ~ transform his work into an unequivocal piece of art for visual pleasure in a space that deserves to be experienced.

His work resembles that of the masters, the contemporary artists assimilated by architecture and, at the same time, the creators of the wooden constructions of the pre-European peoples in different American regions.

The reutilization of the objects and materials of the piece transforms the symbolic meaning through the addition of work histories. Firstly, the work was conceived, not consciously, by another craftsman, another worker who gave shape to the material without thinking that it would turn into a new piece of art. The artistic, the symbolic and the ludic are fundamental ingredients of this artist’s work. Pelayo uses wood and construction materials as his raw material, which in turn he uses to express and communicate his deepest feelings. Enrique Badaró ~ 2008

Bio ~ José Pelayo was born in Montevideo, Uruguay on October 17, 1956. He studied with great teachers such as Rimer Cardillo, Clever Lara, Freddie Faux and David Finkbeiner. Since 1979, he has held individual and collective exhibitions in Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, USA and South Korea and received various awards, prizes and scholarships. His works are present in private collections and museums as well as published in books and journals. Since 1990, he has led his own private workshop devoted to the development of art.

Roberto Píriz

Game Room ~ Living Room ~ Heaven Bound ~ Assembled wood

A solid scaffolding is born out of the geometrical roots. A strong structure of verticals and horizontals creates an ascending piece. A staircase is hinted at, a metaphor of the ascension, of the effort and the pleasure that derives from work. While holes, niches, incoming and outgoing, give the observer a way to approach the work.

Geometry commands our attentions ~ organized by basic symbols: the square, the circle, and the triangle. The color of wood rules: a monochrome gives a tonality that is one with the space around it. In this work, the geometrical tradition of national art and the use of noble materials make up one of the most stunning pieces of the set.

The location of the stone heater adds a peculiar interest. The walls support; they are powerful and unequalled in color and texture. They contrast with the purity of polished wood. The set appears like a big altar with spaces from which emotions may arise.

Píriz incorporates with great use of composition the emblem of the Vik family. The strict elaboration with evocations of the legendary family is part of the sculptural body that crowns the place of heat, of fire, the element that unites men throughout history.

On the doors of the living room ~ the central space ~ the artist also incorporates in two vertical stripes, elegant and refined, the emblem of the family. Enrique Badaró ~ 2008

Bio ~ Roberto Píriz was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1966.
STUDIES AND ACTIVITIES: National School of Fine Arts (ENBA). Engraving Club (engraving techniques), Clever Lara Workshop (Drawing and Painting). Guillermo Fernández Workshop. Altzella Scholarship, Germany (Batuz Foundation). He is a teacher of Plastic Expression (Malvín Workshop).
EXHIBITIONS: Fucuroi City Project, Art Front Gallery (commissioner Fram Kitawa, Tokyo, Japan). Collective exhibition “South 4” (Principium Gallery, Buenos Aires, Argentina). The language of sculpture, Montevideo, Uruguay. Uruguay cultural (Foundation for the Arts, Washington DC, EE.UU).

Octavio Podestá

Carlos Seveso

Master Suite Seveso ~ Moon Lagoon ~ Soffit, acrylic/oil on canvas ~ Mural, encaustic painting on wood ~ Octagonal painting, acrylic/oil on canvas ~ Enameled ceramic mural ~ Mosaic

Carlos Seveso creates subtle yet thorough dialogue between purity represented by the whiteness of his suite, which we thought of as a white box where everything is delicate and pristine, and the irrepressible power of his works. Seveso is an artist whose solid pictorial and conceptual career brings us closer to the world of classical traditions, like a wind rose where the cardinal points are not just a metaphor of intercultural dialogues, but are branded by fire and sword: the chalice, the sacramental cup in which we observe the South American continent, that can also be a bunch of grapes, like the soil which promises abundance and rebirth.

The elegiac representations are in ceramics on the stove. They represent ritual, the sacramental meeting of the races, of different beings, celebrating a new meeting, the birth of a new culture, a crossbred, all sharing the flow of life, which contains not only the sacred liquids but also the flames that illuminate the new paths for the travelers and inhabitants of these faraway lands of the south. In the frieze that uses of the encaustic technique, Seveso interpolates his own memory of the beach landscape ~ eternal horizons, endless summer afternoons, where he was born and developed his life and his art on the coast of José Ignacio.

The shipwreck is a piece that, laden with history, moves us because of its coloration and its location in the bathroom —the temple of the body. It reflects our seductive shores, the dangerous edges that take what they want, while it also refers to the shipwreck or anchoring on this beloved land that sheltered so many foreigners and which is always hard to leave. Enrique Badaró ~ 2008

Bio ~ Carlos Seveso was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1954. He is a renowned national artist with a vast career, mainly as a painter. His curriculum vitae lists his installation experiences, group works, etc. He is workshop head of grade 5 at the National Institute, School of Fine Arts, University of the Republic.

José Trujillo

(1960 – 2019)

Trujillo Suite ~ Gym and Spa ~ Bodies: chords and silences ~ Oil on canvas ~ Oil on wall

Jose Trujillo is a painter of sensuality of interiors. His suite explodes with the pleasure of contemplating bodies in dialogue; man-woman/woman-man, primarily sensual nudes, of tangible flesh, of silky skin, exuberant hair, feet, hands, breasts, arms… Trujillo builds a poetry of corporality. Oil painting becomes flesh, flesh becomes painting.

These bodies surround us, invite us ~ from their erotic silence ~ to freewheel towards a limitless space, providing the oneiric, a dreamlike quality. These naked bodies are the history of art, never obscene, always pictorial; at times becoming architectural. They are constructed by a rigorous hand and eye that is apparent in the composition and the expression. They reach, in their interaction, a peak in the history of art: nudity in ancient times, nudity in classicism, nudity in modern times. Occasionally, the vibration is such that we can almost feel that they are not just bodies posing for the artist but bodies that are dancing, bodies of quiet lovers or sun worshippers, live bodies that generate a unique, rhythmic choreography, with melodious and inaudible echoes to be perceived by the sensitive observer.

The canvas walls of the room imitate a painter’s atelier. It is an iconic space filled with wisdom and experience. Perhaps one of the most important works of art history, “The Painter’s Studio”, by Courbet with the naked woman at its centre, is an inevitable reference. The painter’s studio is the space where everything is possible, where the uncreated vibrates, where the shapeless beats, where ideas lightly touch and produce the whisper of silk, where silences are outbursts of opera or “breakfast on the grass” melodies.

Trujillo is a refined painter of urban spaces and landscapes, a painter of the human figure. He brings us to this world, where an essential part of his story will be shared forever with the traveler who is eager to be accepted at the artist’s atelier, by his models, by the beauty and the taste of bodies beating and shaking, static and in silence…He allows us to share with him this space for poetry, for passion, for the contemplation of the other and of ourselves. Enrique Badaró ~ 2008

Bio ~ José Trujillo was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1960. He studied drawing and painting with M. Lima.

Alejandro Turell

Turell Suite ~ Oil/acrylic on canvas ~ Engraving on metal ~ Etching/dry point, impressed on paper ~ Object sculptures

This creator adopts an extremely sophisticated point of artistic narration. His work is intensely personal and involves a meticulous detailed search and also cosmological visions with zoological, botanical and paleontological studies, but there is another dimension, he employs a kind of scenography with a historical flavor with references to researchers he admires like Linné, Darwin, Humboldt and others, scientists and proto-scientists, dilettantes of centuries past, and this enables him to re-create the atmosphere of that research, but within the peace of an inner vision full of knowledge and aesthetic discoveries.

Turell always presents the elements of his environment, of his ecological identity and of the animals that he depicts with scientific precision, very carefully in his paintings and engravings. His engravings are exquisitely executed, like the draughtsman on old on scientific voyages in the 18th and 19th centuries that accompanied expeditions to record the marvelous discoveries in the New World. Turell takes us back to our own surroundings, our own environment, with an artistic vision that is young, intrepid, curious, and with a prospective viewpoint.

He shows us autochthonous plants and animals that are rendered with taxonomic exactitude and form part of the whole landscape. We see a belfry owl, an armadillo, a partridge, some woodpeckers with their red crests, birds building their nests among the fine reeds. And his paintings that have an ambiguous temporal space (is it twilight or dawn?) but intentionally structured, almost like an archaeological study.

Turell also projects his paintings into practical objects, like a delicate screen made up of a collection of twelve perfectly assembled paintings, with glimpses of birds, on neutral backgrounds, almost extrapolated from nature, and he sees them with the eyes of the naturalist who analyzes everything.

The exhibits speak of an artist with a feel for three dimensional works. One of them, “cámara de maravillas” (chamber of wonders) is loaded with objects/subjects —some found in the country and some he has been collecting or treasuring— full of objective and personal valuations that evoke collectors who love chance or intentional discoveries, and these things are full of manifest enthusiasm at seeing our natural surroundings with the minimum of expression. Enrique Badaró ~ 2008

Bio ~ ALEJANDRO TURELL was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, on May 20 in 1975. He graduated in the plastic and visual arts and his work has been shown in many individual and group exhibitions. He is a teacher at various national institutions. He has exhibited abroad (Buenos Aires, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Frankfurt am Main) and he has worked on projects, classes and workshops along with foreign teachers. In 2001 he won second prize at the Salón Nacional and in 2002 first prize. He has won the Paul Cézanne Prize (from the French Embassy) twice, in 2004 and 2006.

Jorge Páez Vilaró

Belonging to one of the oldest families in the country, raised and educated in a generous culture. He completed his studies at LaSalle University, majoring in Industrial Accounting which will assure a first stage of labor in important industries of Uruguay.

Attends workshops of several masters: Guillermo Rodriguez, Enzo Kabregu, Vicente Martín, Lino said Dinetto in which conditions for the practice of the arts. Since 1948, just after the War he settled in England by joining the most prominent figures in the local arts. From that instance, he made multiple trips to Europe.

In 1957 he organized and led the Municipal Art Museum in Amsterdam a large sample of Uruguayan art, including Torres Garcia, who then turned to several cities, having it as the main facilitator and speakers linked to the world of museology.

Buenos Aires 1961 – first exhibited at Galería Pizarro, with great success of primarily younger artists. He was one of the pioneers of informality in Latin America and owner of one of the most important private collections in the country, which includes works by Picasso, Mondrian, Miro and Rodin, among other great masters of the arts. Participated in the foundation of the Biennial of San Pablo, attending to all issues as a critic, painter, curator and as a member of the International Jury Award.

In the 70’s drives Dibujazo, expanding the idea to the artists to travel on the drawing as an expressive medium in itself. In the same year opened the MAAM-Modern Art Museum of Maldonado, where objects were observed pre-Columbian, colonial and contemporary art. From the stage of the Museum of American Art of Maldonado, Jorge Páez Vilaró organized international shows, national competitions, exhibitions of homage, panoramic, weeks of culture, concerts, theater, ballet, lectures, meetings, festivals, and events continue to occur in today, under the direction of his son. His paintings and drawings have been shown in major museums in Uruguay and elsewhere, as well as in numerous private collections.

Rodrigo Zorrilla de San Martin

Bio ~ Born in Montevideo on April 12, 1972, as a child attends workshops of free expression with Gustavo “Chicken” Vazquez.

His training continued as follows:
1990-1991 Painting Workshop with artist Luis Arias (Workshop Villa Lola)
Painting workshop from 1994 to 1995 with Edgardo Ribeiro Nario (H)
1995 to 1996 Continuing studies with Edgardo Ribeiro (P)
1995 to 1996 Sculpture Workshop Mattos Estella
1996 Exhibition at “1 ª Expo Plastic Jesus Maria” Curators Ignacio Iturria, Gustavo Vazquez, Mario Lorieta 1996 Exhibits at “Expo Workshop Estela Matos”
1996 to 1997 Sculpture Workshop with Marivi Ugolino
1997 Expose ‘XVI Salon Lions youth fine arts” Lions Club from
1997 to 1998 Walter Nadal Paint Shop
1999 to 2000 Studio Photography (Foto Club Uruguayo)
2000 to 2004 paints in his own atelier
2005 to 2006 Atelier in Fac (Fundacion de Arte Contemporaneo) with Fernando Lopez Lage
2007 Painting in his own atelier
2008 Carrasco Opens new Atelier January
2009 Expose pocitos Series “Portraits” in Punta del Este (Fundacion Pablo Atchugarry)
2009 May Expose “Cultural Area San Jose”
2009 September-October Gallery Exhibits J. E. Gomensoro Arenales 960 (Buenos Aires – Argentina)
2009 November Exposes Rigency Club – Los Angeles – California
2010: In March he did a composition of the sixth station of the cross and donated it to the San José de la Montaña church. In April he put the series Escritores de América (Writers of America) on show at the Museo Zorrilla de San Martín.