A painter's bridge of surprises: in the treasure houses of Giancarlo Puppo, disquieting creatures converge to tell intriguing stories.

• Author: Valenzuela, Luisa
• Position: Interview

As modern as he is timeless, this artist uncovers secrets and creates areas of convergence, like hinges, where architecture and painting overlap, offering us a play of colors that melt from canvas onto brick. Bricks are always visible on Puppian walls', they weave sections that remind us of cloth the thick woolen barracan of northwest Argentina or the herringbone pattern of a noble English fabric, the kind they would try to sell us in the days when traveling salesmen went from house to house with their bags full of contraband and treasures.

Giancarlo Puppo has the bag of treasures now and it's not contraband; or perhaps it. is, because art has the ability to cross borders without asking permission or passing through customs. So much so, that this man of deceptively innocent blue eyes crossed one more border and moved into the field of writers. In a beautiful book entitled Strange Lovable Creatures, Puppo's paintings are accompanied by brief stories about how the paintings came to be. They create a daring and brilliant pictorial universe in a kind of Moebius strip, with all the warmth of home, like a fireplace, in tact, when Puppo designs a house, it always has fireplaces, created like sculptures and forming the perfect metaphor for the creative fire that drives the complete spectrum of his plastic art.

The houses of Giancarlo Puppo tell me stories, and I read them as if they were novels. To start with, there are those imaginative outer designs, so unmistakably his; they function as the covers of a book, hinting of the surprises inside. Then there are the textures that call out to be touched, though they may be as rough as dirt, or as the mountain itself. Puppo builds with the eyes of an artist and the hands of an artisan,

Is he an architect-painter? A painter-architect? We flip a coin that has a paintbrush on one side and a T-square on the other. The coin lands on its side, and we all win.

"I'm attracted to images of apparent serenity that could 'also be describing an atrocious universe, like the paintings of Candido Lopez, which would qualify as naive if it weren't for the fact that they show thousands of dead bodies and tell about the bloody war in confesses.

Puppo is also attracted to mischief and irreverence. The pieces he creates purely for aesthetic pleasure become trampolines that catapult us into unknown regions. And we flow along in the same way the nonflowing streams of his paintings flow, crossing bridges every so often that tell...