Swirling spaces of stories and spectators: in disconnected images of bodies, faces, and accessories, Argentine painter Sergio Camporeale merges the real and the fantastic, challenging viewers to create their own interpretation.

• Author: Snow, K. Mitchell

To say that something is always happening in a Sergio Camporeale painting is a bit of an understatement. So many things are happening that it is often hard to absorb them all in one glance.

The protagonists of his works--which range from men wearing business suits and masks made of paper bags to maniacally cheerful characters from animated films--clearly share personalities that are just as complicated as the visual spaces they inhabit. The individuals in Camporeale's paintings recall the kaleidoscopic army of offbeat personalities created by compatriot Julio Cortazar, a colleague of the artist during the years their stays in Paris overlapped.

While each of Camporeale's characters clearly has enough personal history to qualify as the hero, or anti-hero, of a multivolume novel, only a few of his works focus on one character alone. Most of the spaces he creates are filled with his eccentric people, flying into the painting from every conceivable angle with a dizzying force that seems more representative of contemporary technological chaos than any straightforward single image might logically capture.

Each painting is a library full of potential books, some droll, some bizarre, and some even a little frightening--and every viewer is likely to come away from one of his paintings with a library whose contents are theirs alone.

Given the sweeping scope of his work, Camporeale recently created a somewhat daunting challenge for a selected group of contemporary Argentine writers--write an extremely short story, of no more than two or three paragraphs--which captures the essence of one of his paintings. These works from the painter's Teatro Publico (Public Theater) series, displayed alongside the stories that they inspired, toured Argentina in 2000-2001, opening at Buenos Aires' Centro Cultural Recoleta, before moving on to venues in Tandil, Mar del Plata, La Plata, and Bahia Blanca. In conjunction with the exhibition, Provincia Salud sponsored the production of a book, which also places the pictures and stories side by side.

Camporeale hopes this union of paintings and stories will inspire even more narratives as new audiences are drawn into the mysteries of the visual world he has created. "I am interested that the public consent to this artistic experience through double perception," he says, "from painting and from literature, and through these two expressions integrate themselves in a single atmosphere. It is a totally distinct way of approaching pictorial and written work."

The Public Theater show wasn't Camporeale's first major exhibition since returning to his homeland from an extended residence in Paris. The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes organized an exhibition of his works that toured throughout the Americas and various venues in Argentina before ending its journey in the museum's Buenos Aires galleries. He's also no stranger to recognition in his homeland. One of his drawings recently earned him the Gran Premio de Honor in the Salon Nacional de Artes Visuales.

The idea of combining painting and literature began with a short story by Pedro Orgambide that consists of no more than 250 words. In two paragraphs, Orgambide captures the spirit of several Camporeale paintings from the Public Theater series with the tale of a man abandoned at birth at the entrance...