Just for Liliput
With the only help of a few extremely thin Russian brushes, the painter Pablo D'Antoni registers the world in its minimal expression.
For Pablo D'Antoni, the role that nails play in art history does not bound itself to hanging paintings. This artist paints… on the nail heads. His area of expertise is the miniatures. Portraits and Landscapes painted in oils on sizes as big as an aspirin. When working medium size, he reduces his characters to a corner of the painting.
Born in La Plata in 1972, the painter is a graduate from the San Francisco Art Institute in California, United States. He has been living there for almost a decade, with his brother Leonardo, a filmmaker. "I try to achieve realism, inside an unusual dimension," explains D'Antoni in Buenos Aires. Until July 18, his solo "Reduced Affections," waits at the Eclectic Space, Humberto Primo 730.
His inspirational sources are, in its preponderance, the photographic family archive, but also postcards of the mundane as well as portraits of great masters such as Rembrandt, Durer, Goya, Picasso and Van Gogh. He did not feel intimidated in front of views of the great cities such as New York (with the Empire State building included) and San Francisco: the mythical upper Haight boulevard, that Jimi Hendrix knew so well, with the Golden Gate as background, also fit in a diameter of a centimeter. Thus, in the exhibition, loads of minute characters appear in reduced scenarios. Proud of his Italian immigrant descent, D'Antoni keeps a great number of family photographs from all époques (some close relatives, and others whom he does not even know names) that he later depicts over minimal surfaces.
No magnifying glass
As the painter tells us, his inclination towards miniatures started as a mere happenstance. "One day I was painting and needed to clean a brush. I grabbed a Post-it paper, cleaned it, and the shape of a minute apple appeared. Then, I continued painting underneath the orange, a few curtains behind it, and somewhat of a still life appeared" D'Antoni smiles.
To work with such luxury of detail, D'Antoni never used a magnifying glass because, he says, it distorts reality. He makes use of his very good vision and some extremely thin Russian brushes,"that have but a few hairs and allow you attain great detail". To keep his pulse steady, he fabricated "a type of little wood bridge" to rest his hand and work with more steadiness.
Through the miniatures D'Antoni's career has grown: In addition to prizes, he has shown in New York and California. "In the US there is a great move for emerging artists, they get some attention", he explains, as he unpacks a minipainting in which two sail boats disappear into a void.
Maria Ezcurra, Art Critic, La Nacion