Guillermo Nano
Guillermo Nano
What is art for you?
Something that makes my life more pleasurable.
How did you approach art?
By listening to classical music when I was 10 years old. My grandfather played me the music on an old record player.
What things inspire you?
It depends on the moment. Sometimes it can be movie images. Oher times it can be images from a book, or thoughts generated by reading a story.
What are the recurring themes in your work?
I don’t know, they change.
How would you describe your production process?
I have a large room in my apartment. If I’m not painting I keep a white canvas on an easel. When I come up with an idea I start to sketch and color it. That will not necessarily be the final painting, I can take other paths. But the process has started. As for materials, I use all.
How would you define your work in terms of tradition, style, school or trend?
I don’t know, I change. I’ll do 4 or 5 paintings in one style and then change the materials, the forms.
Who´s influenced you?
I observe pop art a lot, it doesn’t have to do with my paintings but I’m attracted to it.
What artists from previous generations are you interested in?
The generation prior to mine. Many artists, Picasso being the most influential, the greatest. I don’t give much attention to my contemporaries.
What would you like to contribute to the world through your art?
To the observer? Sensations, any sensation, I want something to happen between my painting and the spectator. I assume all painters seek that.
“In the case of Nano it’s almost inevitable, before referring to his paintings, to pause on the appearance of a creative process that was latent for a long time and one day emerged, suddenly, in a mature state.
The biographies of artists tend to start with the inevitable signs of craft during childhood. In Nano’s case, on the other hand and at an adult age, his taste for Japanese prints and for the drawings of some artists, his liking of cinema, the habit of reading and listening to music, conversations with painters and visits to museums, left indelible marks in an internal process that was starting and that now transformed without question his passion for painting.”
“On the other hand, beyond the discovery of an unusual technical capacity and a nine-year production of art that seems to have been done in a much longer period, resides the conscience of Guillermo Nano for the history of painting, specially twentieth century painting in the Western world. This knowledge underlies the work of anyone who picks up a brush as a tool of expression with an artistic intent. But in the reminiscence of this consciousness his work appears in a direct and overwhelming way.
Therefore, he is not only a self-taught artist but also someone who had formulated a discourse but not expressed it yet until it took the form of paintings”
Mercedes Casanegra
Master in Art History (UBA)
Member of the Argentine & International Association of Art Critics