During the last week of August, ProyectArte launched the search for its next class of scholarships recipients, targeting aspiring young artists ages 15 to 18. The program will grant eighteen scholarships to individuals to study with acclaimed Argentine artists for the period between March 2010 and July 2011. Until October, at our headquarters on Castillo 540, we will be accepting applications, including portfolios of those applying to the program. After receiving all the applications, the first-round of the selection process is based on the artistic merit of the submitted portfolios by a panel of artists including Jorge Perrin, Horacio D´Allessandro and Karina Peisajovich along with ProyectArte staff members. After this first stage, for a period of one month our team will evaluate the written applications and interview finalists, with the aim of evaluating commitment and socioeconomic factors. This two part process aims to produce a class of students that is artistically talented and driven across the board, while also ensuring socioeconomic diversity, a hallmark of ProyectArte’s vision. Official announcements of scholarship announcements will be made within the first week of December via telephone, with the names of the recipients additionally posted on ProyectArte’s web page. Classes for this new group will begin in the second half of March, which will commence with a social gathering with graduates, and students from the current class, as well as ProyectArte staff. Following, there will be an orientation and introductory classes, which will lead to the commencement of studio classes with the artists. The new group will mean that for half of the 2010 schoolyear, before the current class graduates in July, ProyectArte will increase the number of scholarship students at the school from 18 to 36. This is in addition to the 20+ graduate students who regularly participate in our graduate programs. The growth in our principal program is due to the generous support of Fundacion Tuyu, as well as individual donors to ProyectArte’s scholarship program. ProyectArte would also like to thank Fundacion La Nacion and Revista Magenta for their support in publicizing the search for the new class.

Using the phrase, “Beyond Danger” as the premise, artist Javier Barilaro created a seminar for ProyectArte´s professional development program for graduates. The concepts of ´communication-art-society´were the guiding themes for the diverse set of works presented by the artist. The first class took place on Monday, August 3, and after the artist´s presentation, ProyectArte’s graduates were able to observe examples of national and international works that served to establish an understanding of the role of the works and implications they have in the world. Finally, using collage as an expressive mode, the students created a project making connections between the written word and visual images. In the second class, participants shared their ideas about interventions in public spaces, specifically how aesthetics and personal projects combine to create a visual work. Barilaro presented some works edited by Eloisa Cartonera, a green publishing company he founded with the writer Washington Cucurto, to illustrate the concept that lack or simplicity of resources do not define the quality of the artwork. The phrase, ´thinking of everything´ was a central element of the lecture, which encouraged students to consider both the content and context in which work is created. In the third and final class, five graduates planned their upcoming participation in a mural project to be created by Javier Barilaro as part of a commission by the City of Buenos Aires in commemoration of the Bicentennial of the Independence of Argentina. The collaborative work will be completed and presented in October of this year. This mural project will be another opportunity offered by ProyectArte to its graduates as part of its professional development and will be a satisfying conclusion to this series of engaging and provocative talks that the artist has shared with ProyectArte’s graduates in these past months.

Commenting on what his classes at ProyectArte would be like Xil said, “The course is designed for those who want to learn how to see and create a work; to enjoy classical, modern and contemporary art. We will work to see and understand the basic language of visual arts, art history, and images. In search of nourishment and development our own personal poetry, we will combine the technical and conceptual, with group visits to exhibits, studios, and museums.” Xil Buffone is an artist and chronicler of art. He has an undergraduate degree in Painting and is licensed as a professor of Visual Arts from U.N. Rosario; he holds postgraduate degrees in The History of Modern and Contemporary Art from the University of Sapienza of Rome, Italy (1992), and Philosophy and Aesthetics of Music from the University of Buenos Aires. He assisted in the studios of Emilio Torti, and Juan Pablo Renzi. He studied with the artists Noe Gummier Maier, Horazio Zabala, Eduardo Stupia and Eduardo Costa. He has been exhibiting since 1986, including paintings, objects and installations. He writes for art magazines including Ramona, Roariarate and Vox Virtual. He is a teacher at Centro Cultural Rojas and the Summa Institute. In addition Xil, ProyectArte is pleased to announce that in the coming months two additional artists will join its faculty: Monica Van Asperen and Ernesto Ballesteros — look for articles about these new teachers in future editions of ProyectArte’s newsletter.

Center CONVIVEN focuses on promoting and strengthening the development of the social community network integral to children, adolescents, young people and families in the neighborhoods of Villa Lugano and Mataderos by creating recreational space; providing job training, educational, cultural and community activities. In March of last year works that were created through their “FishEye” photography program were exhibited at ProyectArte’s Prima Gallery. This collaboration was the genesis of a strong relationship between the two organizations, and prompted CONVIVEN to propose that ProyectArte organize art workshops at CONVIVEN’s headquarters. Seeing it as an opportunity for our recent graduates to develop their organizational and teaching skills, ProyectArte offered Lucreica Raimondi and Lucila Sanchez Peña, 2009 graduates of ProyectArte, the opportunity to facilitate and teach the CONVIVEN workshops. Commenting on her experiences as a teacher, Lucila said, “Even though my focus is painting, I was given a drawing class to teach, and that was even more motivating, probably because it was an area where I could also learn. I was nervous about giving the class, and worried that I wouldn´t like the place but all of those doubts, from the first day that I taught with those kids, dissolved. It´s wonderful to see how someone gets excited about something that you´re presenting. The important thing is to be stimulating and convey that feeling. To teach in that space of reciprocal illumination, – I feel very satisfied every time I leave CONVIVEN.” Lucrecia added, “Working with adolescents from very poor neighborhoods is not easy because of the experiences that they live every day, but it´s not because of that that kids stop having the desire to do stuff. The key is to motivate them to do things that they like to do, in this case we gave a class on painting, which is what they decided on through a scholarship offered by the Minister of Social Development. The experience is co-motivating because I am face to face with a social reality that is totally different: the majority of my adolescent students have children, few of them go to school and they suffer from discrimination. By all means, I enjoy working with them and we found a way to create a work environment that is very warm, where the kids connect with the art and with me. For me, it is really important to work from the point of view of being granted a scholarship, and the need to be responsible and to commit yourself, and I tried to express this to them by sharing my experiences at ProyectArte. The classes are an experience that is renewed each Thursday in the classroom because it goes beyond my lesson plans, and is directly dependent on what the students already know, through their motivation and what they bring to the class , or through the affinity that they have with the material presented to them.”

On Saturday, August 22nd through our Visiting Artists Program, and with much anticipation given the artist’s recent seminar at ProyectArte, the scholarship recipients visited the Diego Perrota exhibit, “If it wasn´t God, it was the Devil,” at Centro Cultural Recoleta. The artist himself welcomed and led the students through the exhibition. The following is an account of the visit to the exhibition and their exchanges with the artist, as told to ProyectArte staff member Micaela Hebron by ProyectArte students, Camila Trebliner, Matías Presta y Victoria Falcón: “At first we looked at the exhibition and carefully observed the details of his work. Afterwards we began to talk with him about the actual exhibit, how it was planned out, and even how he initially proposed the exhibit. On Saturday, August 29, when the artist visited our own studio with the idea that he was going to show us projections of his work, he told us some of the most significant experiences of his development as an artist. Diego Perrotta spent his entire childhood in Liners. A neighborhood populated with santerias, with a large immigrant population and symbolic chapel of San Cayetano, the saint of work. This symbol, the artist said, impregnated his mind´s eye and emerged in every one his works. At 22, he received a scholarship for artistic accomplishment from the National Fund of the Arts, and accompanied by his girlfriend, went to Mexico where he stayed for one year. Since then his work has included paintings, watercolors, sculptures, and drawings. He has had different thematic exhibitions where a few consistent elements appear: the devil, numbers, constructions, the tree man, and creatures. Within his admired artists you´ll find Xul Solar and the writer Alberto Rui Sánchez, whom Diego affirmed that he did not know, but, “I would love to, he is a visual artist and he doesn´t know it.”.

On the 15th of August we welcomed the visit of economist Claudio Golonbek, author of the book, “Guide to Investing in the Argentine Art Market” (Rizzo Patricia Editor, 2002), and director of Proyecto A. In a rich and in-depth talk, Claudio addressed students, graduates and members of the staff using precise explanations and specific examples. “No one can say anything about a work – referring to the value of it – without knowing something about the life of the artist.” To back-up his declaration Claudio relayed the history of the blue canvas by Yves Klein (the painter who patented the color of the same work as International Klein Blue). At the same time he said, “it is very important to evaluate the aesthetic risk of the work. This implies,” he explained, “to evaluate the originality and challenges with respect to what has been previously produced, considering the technique and the form used, understanding the meaning and the objective of the piece.” At this point he spoke to us about Marcel Duchamp´s urinal among other examples. Finally, we need to consider the visual value of the work, – the value of the work itself. In this sense, analysis and conceptual development of the work is increasingly important. Given the large number of works that exist, this element is, what in the end, often makes the difference. Considering all of those factors we could define the symbolic value of a work. The price of the same object will fluctuate depending upon whether or not the market has a high demand for it, which has to do with how the society values the work of that artist at that moment. Many times appreciation comes later, i.e. artists in their lifetime don´t sell their art, or they sell them cheap because no one appreciates them enough. Later, sometimes after they have died, the works hugely appreciate in value. However, not all cheap works are the works of a future great artist, some are cheap because they are bad, and others because the artist could no longer continue their career. To know if we are in the face of a future great artist, “I consider it fundamental to evaluate the opinion that established artists have about the work, to analyze which groups the artist being considered belongs to, and where were they educated.” Formal study in the career of an artist is becoming more and more important in the valuation of their work, and without a doubt, Yale is at the top of that list. Golonbek emphasized, however, that this does deny the value and importance of spaces like IUNA in our own country, which provides a free arts education.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Español.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Español.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Español.