(click on the image to enlarge./ click en la imagen para ampliar)
Acrylic Painting "Dos Platos" (" Two Plates") and Me at the Ozaukee County Art Show this year.
© Flavio Martín Morante_2011
For almost a year ( after I came back from Uruguay) I have been randomly thinking and working internally and externally on a not so simple answer to a question with many branches as possible answers.
What its to be "Uruguayan"?; to start I should look at the multiple issues regarding the so-called national identity so hard to assure to have, specially on these globalized times, and specially when the fact of have been out of the country for almost a third of my life, creates a "pause" in someone's life sometimes hard to understand for others as I had on the past when I find myself on a country I like to call "mine" but that at the same time is not anymore the one I like to recall ( and the mental gap keeps growing as time goes by).
Do not get me wrong, I still LOVE "my country" and as I left by choice, I can go back too by choice, a luck that other people do not have. I also like "my other country", the one I live on and the one that like any relative, has things I love and things I would like to change but I can't and I adapt myself ( not accept which is different) to it.
But going back to the issue of "identity", working on multiple things about how to externalize something so "internally abstract" have been on and off during these months giving me some pleasant outcomes. A while ago, having a conversation about the "good and bad" about Andy Warhol and the "immortalization" of the Campbell Soup, I thought on a idea that seemed silly but that it made a lot of sense for me. To take elements from "uruguayan culture" and convert them into an icon. But how to do that when someone's ideas of "iconic" can be very different from mine?. To give you an example, Uruguay, a country BIG on soccer as a religious way of life, finds in myself the most agnostic possible person to try to convince of affiliating. Anyway..., I started simple (and again, I am still working on it), so I took things around me, specially the ones I have with me that are not the ones related to my most closest circles ( family and friends) and the obviously repeated ( tango, soccer, etc) and that its when it did hit me... pum!!! food its one.
So when I started to think about it I came up with the idea about how certain colors and shapes bring a chain reaction of memories in a person, specially when the focus is the so called "national identity". So far I had painted 3 concepts of uruguayan related concepts, while I am still processing not only others, but also how am I going to represent them in a way that makes some sense, even if it is just to me. Going back to the food, I still have with me 3 packages left of Polenta Puritas (national brand) from the last time I was down there (Uruguay) and today I re confirmed the concept. Polenta o bird food as my wife Dawn likes to call it, is one of those things that makes its way to me as one of the things part of that general, popular and simplistic way I would describe before the answer of what its Uruguay?
As simple it seems, polenta to me, is my Mom making lunch for me and my sisters before going to school. It is a family table with relatives when Sundays were pack with cousins before everyone started to make their Sundays. It is a cold winter with the clear sun comes shy through a window and letting you see spirals of smoke coming out of the plate, with the most comforting feelings, its the smell of home made food and the first glass of wine served by your father when you were 10 years old. It is a cheap way ( or not) to put a plate of food on the table during the bad times. And yes, the list can keep growing and that its why I had to find a way to represent that (even if it was for myself) so when I look at it, even in its most abstract shape, would remind me of Uruguay (pictures below).
Today, I had lunch with my mother in law and I had a plate of "uruguayan style polenta", something that have become some type of personal tradition when the first snow comes, sign of a winter coming, and the simple fact of that plate on the table with the smells, looks and shapes as I will always picture them, took me for half hour to Montevideo, to my childhood, to a country is not anymore there but I still carry with me. Even if it is in the shape of a painting.
Martin Morante.
PS_ If you did finish reading this post I tell yo... Bon Appétit!
(click on the image to enlarge./ click en la imagen para ampliar)
"Uruguayan Lunch" (polenta with meat sauce).
© Flavio Martín Morante_2011
(click on the image to enlarge./ click en la imagen para ampliar)
Polenta Puritas' package. A design that has not change for at least the time I can remember.
(click on the image to enlarge./ click en la imagen para ampliar)
"Dos Platos" ( Two Plates")
Acrylic painting on canvas, 18 x 24 inches.
© Flavio Martín Morante_2011
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