Salomone, by Esteban Pastorino  (January 26, 2010)

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Curator Statement - Marcelo Brodsky on Esteban Pastorino

Esteban Pastorino is a special photographer. He builds his own cameras. He creates his way of seeing from scratch. He imagines it and then sets the tools up to make it happen. His work on the Salamone buildings in the Province of Buenos Aires, the richest one in Argentina where the Pampas are, looks back into a time in which modernization in Latin America was influenced by European visions, brought by the millions of immigrants that came to these countries to look for fortune and a new life. The Italian classic spirit of Salamone's architecture, may have been influenced by a fascist vision. Monumental shapes stand in the middle of the Pampas, their ghastly look captured by Pastorino's camera. The black and white essay presented here anticipates the vibrant maquette-like images that Pastorino is now known for. Views for this post have not been counted.

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Artist Testimonial

In 1998 and 2001 I travelled around the province of Buenos Aires (Argentina) with the purpose of making a photographic survey on Architect Francisco Salomone's buildings. His work, developed between 1936 and 1940, in approximately twentyfive towns and cities of the province, was compliant with the plan of Manuel Fresco’s conservative government, which aimed at building slaughter houses, cemeteries, and town halls in several areas of his jurisdiction.

My interest towards this issue was first aroused in 1997 by a documentary exhibition held at Borges Cultural Centre. In it, the art critic Edward Shaw presented information on the majority of Salomone's production. Fascinated by the symbolic implications of this building program -symbols that enter the political, historical, literary and, in general, ideological grounds- I made the decision of exploring this architecture by means of the photographic media.

Salomone's work is a monumental and wonderfully creative expression of a style in which Art Deco and Rationalism merge. In my view, and analyzing it from the perspective given by the current situation, his task as official architect shows the failure of a country's project. Although Fresco's management was quite successful, behind his ambitious urban program, the failure of the rich agricultural and farming Argentina utopia became apparent once again. And this failure broadens the gap between that fiction we still believe in, and the reality we are not yet determined to accept.

Esteban Pastorino (1972) lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Click weblink estebanpastorinodiaz.com or browse our archives

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