Nobel Peace Prize Pérez Esquivel exposes his other life: art

Oil paintings, ink drawings, wood and bronze sculptures, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel shows his other life, that of art, starting this Saturday, in an exhibition that collects his work since the 1950s.

With an intense militancy in the defense of human rights, which earned him the Nobel Prize in 1980, after being imprisoned and tortured by the Argentine military dictatorship (1976-83), Pérez Esquivel’s lesser-known facet is that of architect and artist. plastic, studies he conducted at the University of La Plata and the National School of Fine Arts.

But with the exception of a series of drawings of the Buenos Aires neighborhood of La Boca, from the 1950s, and the portraits of his wife Amanda and his son Ernesto, the exhibition at the Lucy Mattos Museum, in Béccar, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Aires, reflects a work with a strong political component.

“For me, art is not different from life, it’s the same thing. It’s the way of saying something that one has inside and wants to transmit it,” Pérez Esquivel said in an interview with AFP.

Drawings of the bombing of a shelter in Iraq in 2001, or of a trip to Hiroshima, are exhibited together with the acrylic painting “The Virgin of the Cartoneros”, as street recyclers are called in Argentina.

“That work is going to go to the cartoneros. They know it and they are waiting for it,” he said. “No one taught me poverty, but I was one of the poor.”

Born in 1931 in the city of Buenos Aires, Pérez Esquivel was orphaned at a very young age and was cared for by nuns in a boarding school and also by his maternal grandmother, of Guaraní indigenous origin.

“Irak, Hiroshima, were scenarios in which I participated. They didn’t tell me, I was there. Art generates memory. We passed and art remains,” he asserted about the images of war.

The exhibition also includes a painting about the refugees he met on the island of Lesbos (Greece) and episodes from contemporary Argentine history.

Laura Casanovas, curator of the exhibition, explained that in the case of Pérez Esquivel “there was never a split between art and struggle. The ink drawings, woodcuts, acrylic paintings, watercolors and sculptures reveal different stylistic stages with close plastic proposals both realism and the avant-garde, especially with Latin American roots, but with their own formal solutions”.

Although Pérez Esquivel has a mural in the cathedral of Riobamba, in Ecuador, another in Curitiba (Brazil) and a sculpture in homage to Gandhi in Barcelona (Spain), among other permanent installations, this exhibition is the first he has held in more 40 years old.

“I have had many occupations and time goes by” he justified about not having organized an exhibition before.

Spirituality

At 90 years old, he continues to paint. At this time he recreates “The Last Supper” in a painting that is still being prepared and in which he will include the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene along with the twelve apostles.

With a deep religious belief, Pérez Esquivel was very close to Liberation Theology and militated with non-violent grassroots Christian movements. In his paintings, the main figures of that movement stand out, such as the Brazilian Helder Cámara or Monsignor Arnulfo Romero, from El Salvador.

“I went through the torture, the flights of death, but I never put myself in a position of existential anguish. It was because of spirituality. It is what saves me and saved me from seeing the horror, from seeing death,” said this man of slow speech who barely helps himself with a cane.

Of the paintings on display, one of his favorites is “Death in love with life”, in which a skull offers a flower to a seated woman. “Death and life are the same thing. There is not one without the other,” she said.

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(END) AFP/JAM



Nobel Peace Prize Pérez Esquivel exposes his other life: art