Carlos Páez Vilaró
Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales
ArtNexus, #121 (June 2024)

To commemorate the ninetieth anniversary of Uruguayan artist Carlos Páez Vilaró (1923-2014), the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales (MNAV) hosted the anthological solo show Fantasías africanas (African Fantasies), curated by Manuel Neves and arranged on the museum’s second floor. The exhibition proposed a chronological journey through the different periods and series of his trajectory.

​

It is worth highlighting the challenge involved in holding an exhibition of such a popular artist in Uruguay and beyond, whose work has even appeared in reproductions on water bottle labels. Páez Vilaró was mostly known for his works on African culture and for his series of suns, which were widely disseminated and celebrated during his lifetime by the public, as well as the general and specialized press, although at the end of the 1960s he was rejected by Montevideo’s intellectual and bohemian society. This was not an easy curatorial challenge since the public has preconceived ideas of what they will encounter but, at the same time, wants to be surprised. So, what exactly was the contribution of this show?

 

​

 

The curator did not ignore all these controversies. With them in mind, he sought to offer an overview of the artist’s body of work so that everyone could judge it from their own perspective and get to know his lesser-known pieces. For this, he made a selection of a little more than fifty easel paintings—in contrast to the number of murals he created both in Uruguay and abroad—that reveal his diverse artistic interests and investigations.

​

During an interview on the Perfiles program, Carlos Páez Vilaró had defined himself as “a doer,” and perhaps it’s the label that best fits him. He was self-taught and recognized his technical limitations. He created in spurts: he would enter moments of frenetic production when he would focus on a technique, a theme, or an idea and then leave it behind him. His series are very diverse. We can recognize different influences of modern art throughout the 20th century. Although Páez Vilaró centered on his pictorial work, he was a multifaceted man with multiple interests who was not afraid to tackle anything: he made books, ceramics, sculpture, traveled the world, built the emblematic Casapueblo house-hotel-museum in Punta Ballena, made murals, wrote music, designed clothing, and so on.

​

Among the selected works from the 1950s, we can detect a clear influence of modern European art, with a figuration that approaches abstraction. They renounce perspective, and the backgrounds are flat. In the 1960s, he repeatedly recurred to Informalism, with material and sign works where background and form lose all meaning. In his series “Fetish” (1988), among others, the figure once again takes center stage, in addition to using geometric elements with a marked abstraction in the synthesis of forms, and where the background is once again relegated to a second plane. From here on, his palette becomes more vibrant, with strong colors such as red, yellow, blue, or green.

​

Perhaps he achieved greater ease and a stronger personal voice in his latest works on candombe, Afro-descendant culture, and his suns. This is not a logical consequence of his previous work, but rather one more irruption through which he seems to have stripped away the art of the time to create something distinctively his own. Certainly, his admiration for the work of Pedro Figari is present, which he already knew back in the 1950s, but we must also recognize his close link with Afro culture both from Uruguay and Africa. Firstly, he had his workshop located in the famous Mediomundo tenement for several years, and he frequented and had great friendships with several leaders of the Uruguayan Afro-descendant culture of the time; among them Waldemar Cachila Silva and the Morenada and Cuareim 1080 lubolo troupes. Also, at the beginning of the 1960s, he traveled to Africa, coming into direct contact with that geography and culture. He even exhibited at the Angola Museum and created several murals in Congo, Cameroon, and Mali, among other countries.

​

It is difficult to find a common denominator in his work, but drawing and line prevail for the most part. His lines can be meticulous, almost calligraphic, or else much looser. He seems to have explored different formats, techniques, and styles that accompanied the historical moment or the predominant current of the time and its concerns. According to the curator, the backbone of his work is precisely his interest in the African continent and its culture; hence the show’s title. At the end of the exhibition, his most recognizable and widespread pieces were displayed: the suns and the candombe, with the distinctive style that made him popular.

​

In short, this retrospective managed to show the diversity and polyphony of Páez Vilaró’s work. It also brought to the museum a group of works that always sought to be accessible and popular so as to reach different people in a direct way, as opposed to elitist art for connoisseurs.