Ignacio Iturria: painting from memory.

• Author: Bianco, Adriana
• Position: ART - Interview - Brief biography

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Uruguay, that beautiful country in South America's Southern Cone, has a rich aesthetic tradition. A national iconography began to take shape with the works of the nineteenth-century painter Juan Manuel Blanes and the folkloric paintings of Pedro Figari, and found its full flowering in the Constructivist school of Joaquin Torres Garcia.

Like his predecessors, Uruguayan artist Ignacio Iturria expresses the collective imagination of his country but with an aesthetic and language all his own. The artistic world he creates has its roots in what it means to be Uruguayan, but his "pictorial dreams" transport the viewer to a universal, existential plane, one in which man perceives his smallness and his solitude, a strange relationship with objects, and a sense of contemporary alienation. Iturria's paintings, which are like stage sets, portray the everyday with a certain irony and humor, and with a reflective daydreaming quality in which the boundaries of memory blur and real time merges with the time of dreams.

A house, objects, buildings, the city--all mark a space where man confronts his human condition. The miniaturization of his characters in different settings has the effect of creating "mega-spaces" that underscore isolation. His little wire people (reminiscent of Giacometti) are characters out of narrative sequences, part of events that transpire; they belong to a "psychological time" that evokes the past and the play-related visions of childhood.

This sense of time and the circular space of the house and the city make up a personal aesthetic that flows through an ambiguous atmosphere of muted colors and thick layers of paint as if penetrating a dream. For Iturria, life seems like a dream and the dream a painting.

Ignacio Iturria was born in Montevideo in 1949 and after a long period in Spain, returned to his country, though he travels frequently for exhibitions. He began his career with a show at the Salon Municipal de Montevideo, in Punta del Este; later, he participated in events in Spain, showing in Cadaques, in the Catalonia region, and in Madrid at the ARCO International Art Fair, in 1983. Galeria Praxis presented a show of Iturria's in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1984, and at the Frankfurt fair in Germany. In 1995, Iturria represented Uruguay at the XLVI Venice Biennale, where he obtained the "Casa di Risparmio" special prize.

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In 1998, Mexico's Museo Tamayo had a major exhibition. In 2000, the Marlborough Gallery presented his work in New York, and the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, in San Juan, dedicated a show to him as a special guest at the International Biennial of Graphic Arts. In 2004, the Boca...