"I'm a painter who plays at being another painter": Nahuel Vecino celebrates the great masters in a Buenos Aires palace

I can bet that Nahuel Vecino (Buenos Aires, 1977) and Matías Errázuriz (Santiago de Chile, 1866 - Zapallar, 1953) would have been great friends if not for the time difference that separates them. Both are passionate about art history, as demonstrated by one in his paintings, the other in the neoclassical mansion he commissioned from architect René Sergent.

The refined taste of the Errázuriz Alvear family's grand hôtel particulier lives on in a Renaissance-inspired Grand Hall, a dining room in the style of the Hercules Room at the Palace of Versailles , a winter garden or fumoir with neoclassical lines, and a ballroom with gilded paneling and mirrors like those in Rohan Soubise's Rococo mansion in Paris. Nahuel Vecino's drawings, pastels, and oil paintings point their attention to Géricault, Goya, Delacroix, Fragonard, De Chirico, and others, as well as to everyday objects such as a delivery man's red backpack , wine of dubious quality, and his own intimate personal history.

A monumental display of more than 70 works can be seen in the halls of the Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo , formerly the Errázuriz Alvear residence, arranged according to the curatorial directives of Patricio Orellana . The name of the exhibition is Versailles , which refers both to the city that was the capital of the Kingdom of France throughout the 18th century, and to the western neighborhood of Buenos Aires famous for the house where Esperando la Carroza was filmed.

This is not the first time that Vecino has exploited the ambiguities of toponymy . He did so with Pompeya , his exhibition at the Centro Cultural Recoleta in 2008, named after both the city destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the Buenos Aires neighborhood with its working-class, tango-themed traditions. The towns of Londres, in the province of Catamarca, and Paris, in Texas (which inspired Wim Wenders ' film) are examples of this unusual geography.

The work that occupies the cover of the catalogue, and at the same time welcomes the viewer to the Grand Hall, is an oil painting of an African mask called Malraux's Dream . Vecino explains of it: “It is a work that encapsulates the meaning and spirit of the entire exhibition. André Malraux was a writer, poet, art connoisseur, traveller and Minister of Culture for Charles de Gaulle after the Second World War. Among other books, he wrote The Imaginary Museum , which contains the encyclopedic idea of ​​the 20th century, the survey and ordering of the great cultures, the great masters, the great men, African art, American art, classical antiquity, etc.”

Vecino continues: “I am fascinated by this dreamlike journey, by those characters mounted on celestial thrones. I like this unveiling of the exotic from a European perspective, of the unknown, of the lost paradise. I want to reverse that mechanism. I am the one who discovers Malraux’s dream from a lost and forgotten South American port, or that Malraux discovers me, or that I am one of those great masters, something that is exhausted today because going out to discover the exotic no longer exists; the world no longer holds any mystery because globalization has made everything the same . The other movement, the horizontal, earthly one towards the spiritual, towards an added value that was going to elevate you, no longer exists. Now there is a circular, repetitive algorithm that leads you to consume something.”

In the palace dining room hang two gigantic paintings of hunting scenes (one with the deer and the other with the wild boar) by Alfred de Dreux , a French painter whom Théodore Géricault painted as a child, as can be seen in the work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is no coincidence that they are hunting scenes; since the Middle Ages, hunting was an activity reserved only for the upper classes and nobility, and forbidden to peasants. Eating deer and wild boar was only for a few.

In one of Vecino’s works, there is a reference to a deer being harassed by a dog, next to a sculpted head on a pedestal, a striped shopping bag, and a book containing a portrait of Sergio De Loof , the multifaceted artist from the 1990s. Vecino clarifies: “In this pastel, I invented a book by De Loof; that painting is called The Great Masters , there is a work from 19th-century France, Sergio’s book, and a decapitated sculpture of my own, so I’m quoting myself. Sergio was very special to me because I felt at odds with contemporary art. When I met him, I felt that he had enabled me to play at being the monarch of my own palace, to be able to play at being Delacroix, a 19th-century Romantic painter.”

And he continues: “De Loof lived in a house in the town of Alejandro Korn, he asked me to paint two parrots on a piece of furniture, a kind of chinoiserie , he had a four-poster bed made from vegetable crates. He greeted me with music from the film All the Mornings of the World, the March for the Ceremony of the Turks, by Jean Baptiste Lully . Sergio taught me to play at being a king, to play at being an artist, that the palace can be made of poor gold, to pivot between solemnity and laughter.”

Indeed, Vecino's painting has a neo-archaic quality; it eschews technical experimentation, demonstrates skill and love for the painter's craft, has a strong sense of narrative, knowledge of art history, and an updated understanding of its iconography. Vecino defines himself: "I am a painter who plays at being another painter. I look at Géricault's horses and want to paint like him, but the result is a Nahuel Vecino, a work of my own."

Anyone who examines his work can perceive the inspiration in themes from great painters , without needing to specify who; some horses can evoke Géricault, and at the same time the classical period of De Chirico; the wounded soldier harassed by a large swan has something of the Greek myth of Leda, and also of the mutilated figures in Goya's Disasters of War , or the war series by Otto Dix .

There's also a poster-like air of a guardian angel watching over the children crossing the broken bridge, a reference to kitsch, but without being kitsch; there's some surreal beauty , without being surreal, in the friendship of objects that aren't friends, like a bunch of bananas and a Fragonard book, like Aladdin's shell-shaped lamp expelled by a female genie looking at her cell phone, a butterfly on a blue two-peso bill, or a young cardboard collector heading to a palace.

Vecino manages to bring the great masters into everyday life , as if he could relocate the Palace of Versailles to the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Versailles.

Versailles opens to the public on April 30 at 1:00 p.m. and can be visited from Wednesday to Sunday from 1:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m., at the National Museum of Decorative Art, Av. del Libertador 1902, Buenos Aires City.