Alberto Heredia

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1924 – 2000

            Rebellious and solitary, Alberto Heredia defended an art related to life. His work has been a metaphor for thinking about reality. Dedicated to inhabiting the in-between, he was able to say things through his work at times when it was difficult to speak out. Ethical and not aesthetic, as he liked to say, he was a lover of a revulsive art made with what he had at hand.

            He was a self-taught sculptor. He studied for a year at the Fine Arts School, "I dropped out or they dropped me out," he said. "I started in sculpture for a tactile sensation, as a concept". That time at the academy brought him closer to Horacio Juárez, who was his teacher for two years. They modeled in a naturalistic way, but Heredia did not like it. He rejected the classic technique, as he preferred Rodin, modernism, so he left the lessons and worked independently.

            He took lessons with art critic Jorge Romero Brest and thus began his relationship with modern sculpture. "There I began my first experience in geometric sculpture and concretism, that was in 1952 and then in 1960 I went to Europe." In Paris, he was a friend of Alberto Greco and participated in his work. Alberto Heredia's work changed its course, always dramatic, ironic, and with touches of black humor. In that city, he began his work with boxes of Camembert cheese, the object as a vehicle to convey what he wanted to communicate. Some themes were a constant in his work: life and death, consumer society, social criticism as the basis of his creation, in that sense "the boxes were a great vomit".

            The precariousness, the decadent sculptures, and the assemblies were made with objects he found in the street, in the attics of his acquaintances, in the closets of his friends, in demolitions. A scrap dealer of pain, as the writer Miguel Briante called him. The material he chose always had memories; it was impregnated with the history of those who had used it. And his history was marked by drama: the death of his father, shot when he was eight years old, and an accident, after his trip to Europe, that left him bedridden in a hospital and with a permanent limp.

            The pain and fragmentation of his body were imprinted in his work, resulting in fragile but forceful works. Perhaps these facts made him a very restless person and a great reader, a lover of Camus, Rimbaud, and Miller: "I read Miller and was delighted by the horror", he once said. He was kitsch, dark and bold, and he mixed popular elements in bourgeois halls. He used irony to account for power struggles.

            He always worked in series, "Engendros" (Monstrosities), "Los amordazamientos" (The Gaggings), "Ángeles" (Angels). He took up iconographic elements of passion in the latter, such as the crown of thorns and the spear. A cursed angel and inveterate collector, the extreme image to show us society as he saw it.