Carlos Páez Vilaró - fragmentos

Inspired by this article from La Nacion, read over coffee and medialunas one morning, I gathered up a few friends and took the train to Tigre to visit the new exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Carlos Páez Vilaró. Páez Vilaró has been painting for a long time, hanging out with the likes of Picasso and, alternatively, Albert Schweitzer at his leprosy hospital in the Gabon. (*painting to the right entitled, "Suddenly, another sun was born.") I had wanted to visit his Casapueblo near Punto del Este in Uruguay but it was this paragraph that made the exhibition a must see for me:

Su amor por las orillas de Uruguay y de la Argentina, su interés por la cultura afrouruguaya, su pasión por los viajes y por la pintura que, en sus propias palabras, "le dio todo", se imbrican de forma tal que es difícil separar al artista del hombre.
His love for the river banks of Uruguay and Argentina, his interest in African-Uruguayan culture, his passion for travel and painting, in his own words, 'say it all,' are interwoven in such a way that it is difficult to separate the artist from the man.

I spent a long time with his most recent paintings imagining the resistance of Africans to slavery and colonialism.

"I was present when the African revolution shot its first arrow" (part)








"I stayed magnetized on arriving at the shores of the island of Fernando Pó"









At his home in Tigre, a quiet walk down the river bank, the late afternoon light flooded the enclosed garden, and lush green prevented all but glances of the casapueblo-style house constructed there.