Antonio Seguí exhibition "The Swarming of the World"

Antonio Seguí exhibition
The Swarming of the World

From 22 July to 21 October 2017

Represented in more than a hundred museums in the world, the Argentinian master stops over for three months in Saint-Malo for the “Antonio Seguí. The Swarming of the World” exhibition. This is a retrospective with around thirty works from different times to tell “the swarming of the world”.

“True star in South America since the end of the fifties, his work was revealed in Europe during the 3rd Biennale of Paris in 1963. Exhibitions in the greatest museums in the world followed”, could regularly be read about him. This summary has the merit of telling the essential: the importance Antonio Seguí has in contemporary painting. The artist was born in 1934 in Argentina, his works are now exposed in more than a hundred museums and public collections in the world.
What works! Drawings, paintings, lithography, engravings, sculptures, they all give multiple characters to see. Sometimes women, more or less femme fatale. Mostly men, with a South-American look clearly accentuated, they seem to always run around towards an unknown goal… this is the story Antonio Seguí offers us: a colourful universe, tense, often absurd! Only remedy for this folly? The ironic and soft happiness the artist offers us from canvas to canvas…
Showing humanity… Then sparking a laugh or a smile at all costs!
On the wall, around thirty works from different times, some are paintings, some are drawings, lithographs or carborundum prints, all testify of this undisputable truth: universal Antonio Seguí is one of the great
observers of our time.

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Exhibited works

Antonio Seguí
In all superb

Because the man standing, the man passing through, was obviously him, Antonio Seguí, an Argentinian artist born in Córdoba in 1934, then voluntary exile in 1951 to discover Europe. At the time, he had crossed the Atlantic in a boat, assiduously installed on the bridge, reading, observing and drawing a lot – preferably the swarming of the small world embarked with him. “Eighteen days at sea”, he recalls before evoking his irrepressible passion for marine atmospheres. They alone explain that, during his life, he often went to Brittany, that he stopped several times in Saint-Malo and that he returns there today, haloed with his memories, his genius, his glory.

And what glory! “In Argentina, Antonio Seguí is a national hero. Galleries and museums snapped up his paintings. His gigantic, laughing and colorful sculptures have conquered the public squares of Córdoba and Buenos Aires”, wrote Éric Tariant in March 2013. A summary, to say the least, since the chronicle knows that most of the capitals of the earth hosted dazzling exhibitions, always very popular with the public. His secret? The so-called Gustavo, emblematic character of his work, a sort of modern gaucho entangled in the city. From morning to night, this metaphorical Gustavo struggles and gets lost without being able to tell us if he is running after women, after money, after flashes, after himself. Ironic? Sure ! Ironic, biting, disillusioned, but in all superb, because carried by a total mastery of drawing and a keen sense of color. Moreover, once staring at Antonio Seguí with his gigantic eye, Malraux was not mistaken: “You are a painter.”
He thought: a great painter

Christophe Penot
Éditeur d’Art