Art in General – and My Art in Particular-, Design, Creativity, Sustainability, Jazz and any Cool Stuff I may think and manage to write about with some sense.
Have I been naughty or nice?
It’s the last Monday before Christmas and a good time to start looking into whether we have been naughty or nice. I guess, like most people except the very few, I have been both of those things but with a marked effort towards getting to be the latter.
Life is short and as the years start moving faster, regrets start piling up. As you can see I am not one of those “no regrets” type of people. I think we all regret doing certain things and, most importantly, I do believe that we should feel sorry about certain things we have done during our life. Most of us have had moments in which we have been hurtful, absent, or simply awful to others. So, as my first formal and public step into the spirit of the season, here is my heartfelt apology to all the people I have hurt this year, for any reason, and whether knowingly or not. To all of you, please accept my call for forgiveness and my promise of a real effort to be better in the future.
Now, one of the things I do not regret about 2011 is where I have gone with my art. It has been shaky at times, a little hard to keep up in terms of quality and quantity of work, but it has proven a breakthrough year in many respects. For that reason I would like to thank, following in my Christmas spirited line of thought, all those people who have helped my art along this year. From family, friends, admirers and critics, to journalists, the media in general, gallery owners, and buyers. You have all helped me along this difficult road of artistic expression and I am very grateful for your support, comments and criticism.
So, now let us turn to some new work!
This is another one of my new paintings from the second semester of 2011 and which have just been uploaded to my website at www.ignacioalperin.com.
It is called ”Blow by Blow”. Inspired by many of those golden years brassy tunes that are too harsh for the midnight hour but give us a hell of a kick in the rear at times of sorrow, or simply when we are a bit down and we need a nice shot in the arm.
To accompany this painting, I invite you to enjoy Duke Ellington live with his orchestra performing one of those cheerful songs and one of the titles which inspired my composition, this one called coincidentally “Blow by Blow”.
Looking through my videos (http://youtube.com/ignacioalperin) I would like to bring forward one from February this year about the “Making of” my Standard Bank Foundation Gallery Exhibition which took place in March- April 2011. I had forgotten how cool the music sounded. I hope you enjoy it too, either again or for the first time if you have not seen it before.
ABOUT IGNACIO
Ignacio was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, grew up in Australia and lived in several countries around the globe until his return to his country of origin 15 years ago.
At a very young age and with the help of his mother, a talented artist herself, and his father, an engineer internationally renowned for his creativity and innovation, he took his first steps in the world of art. Surrounded by drawing tables, technical pens and architectural influences he began to create his own path.
His early influences were very eclectic and mature for his age. They included great masters like Rembrandt, Monet, Van Gogh and Picasso, as well as modern masters like Kandinsky, Pollock, de Kooning and Rauschenberg. Drawing, painting, and a great deal of reading took an important place in his life.
During his early 20s he develops a love affair with jazz, becoming an avid follower of the local Australian jazz scene and as a result, his painting begins to show signs of this inspiration. Complex rhythms, intertwining melodies, and a great deal of improvisational skills are developed in his art.
That slow and jazzy pace also helped him mature his own approaches and techniques while freeing himself from classical ties, finding stimulus in unusual places and developing a unique and sensitive voice.
Added to that, his artistically applied synesthesia –condition which he shares with Kandinsky-, adds to his work an unusual share of musicality and innovation. The artist admits the complexity of combining his artistic imprint with the possibilities this "gift" generates while always underlining that it is a constant exploration, full of achievements as well as challenges.
The result is a fusion that explores the limits of colors and shapes within a marked abstraction. An expressive path without reservations strongly anchored on his individuality and unique experience.
This exploration has not only been applied to his painting. He has also pursued his vision into other forms of artistic expression, including smaller architectural and design projects, and graphic design assignments applied to advertising and marketing.
VISUAL JAZZ
IGNACIO ALPERÍN BRUVERA
The works presented in his Blog are a fraction of the main series developed by the artist and which has been travelling around different cities around the world since 2010. The artist’s "Visual Jazz Tour" encompasses works aided by his synesthesia and based on a visual interpretation of melodies, mainly from traditional and avant-garde jazz, soul, Motown and the American songbook, expressed in shapes and colors.
Fascinated by this musical genre, Alperín has created his own visual language through the same methods of inventiveness and spontaneity as musicians. We find in his paintings spectacular spiral lines and longitudinal strokes which glide through the canvas, outlined by an energetic use of the primary palette, extracting from these colors unthought-of shades and gradations that have become a signature and a characteristic of his bold and powerful style.
In this way he has built its own movement filled language to communicate and engage in a dialogue with the public; mostly divorced from figurative representation, he constructs a visceral abstraction that stimulates the imagination and turn on the viewers’ inner sensations.
Ñ magazine (South America´s largest selling arts and culture magazine), in its issue of September 11, 2010, under the title "IGNACIO ALPERIN in NEW YORK – an Argentine visual Jazz show" went further than that, drawing a parallel between the love of jazz from the great Argentine writer Julio Cortazar and his incorporation of this musical form into literature, with the work of Alperín and his intention to assimilate this same musical form, this time in the realm of visual art.
Many subsequent articles in La Nación and Clarin newspapers (Argentina´s best- selling newspapers), as well as specialized magazines such as the above mentioned Ñ, ADN and Maleva Mag –just to mention a few - have also constantly highlighted his originality and constant growth.
The artist has conceptualized his art in a term that expresses the musicality of his work together with the movement that he seeks to impose on it.
The viewers are thus encouraged to become emotionally involved, transcending everyday reality in a process without space, age or time, towards a more universal, melodic and harmonious view of everything that surrounds them.
The work of Alperín has movement, rhythm, coolness and a degree of visual improvisation that is meant to hide a very well studied score. The result is constant dynamism and exceptional use of color in a never ending search for beats and counterpoints.
This synthesis of Art and music, or "Visual Jazz" as an American journalist baptized it a few years ago, it is almost a trademark of Alperin´s work with a strong track record and exhibitions in New York, Miami, London, Melbourne, Zurich, Lisbon and in Argentina.
Currently, the artist discloses the development of his work and research, and how it applies to corporate and professionally applied creativity in academia, as professor of Creativity and Innovation at the Universidad Católica Argentina (The Argentine National Catholic University in Buenos Aires), and gives seminars on the subject in the context of workshops and events for individuals, companies and artists both in Spanish and English. View all posts by Ignacio Alperin Bruvera