Nahuel Vecino's Largest Exhibition

A "Russian Doll": The Palace of Versailles will be housed inside the Errázuriz Palace in Buenos Aires
At the headquarters of the National Museum of Decorative Art, the largest exhibition ever created by Nahuel Vecino will link the former French royal residence with the local neighborhood of the same name.
Something is changing at the Errázuriz Palace, home to the National Museum of Decorative Art (MNAD). Like a Russian doll, the building designed in 1911 by architect René Sergent will be hosting Versailles, the largest exhibition ever created by Nahuel Vecino, an artist born in Buenos Aires in 1977 and accustomed to establishing multiple connections in his paintings.
Just as Pompeii, the exhibition shown in 2008 at the Recoleta Cultural Center, linked the ancient Roman city with the Buenos Aires neighborhood, now he is set to continue that metonymic game. With a single word, he will evoke both the former residence built by King Louis XIV in the French town and another Buenos Aires neighborhood named in his honor by former mayor José Guerrico.

There could not be a more appropriate place to create this imaginary bridge that spans time and space, in the manner of Julio Cortázar in "The Other Sky" or Jorge Macchi when he recreated his Florida 1000 rooms inside the Ruth Benzacar gallery in Villa Crespo. Now, a "Salon of the Rejected" featuring works by Vecino will update the exhibition of works rejected by the official jury of the 1863 Paris Salon, which made possible the birth of Impressionism and the creation of the Salon of Independents.
“The Errázuriz family dining room, designed in 1916 by French decorator Georges Hoentschel, is inspired by the Hercules Room at the Palace of Versailles,” says Hugo Pontoriero, museum director. Courtesy of MNAD.
“The Errázuriz family dining room, designed in 1916 by French decorator Georges Hoentschel, is inspired by the Hercules Room at the Palace of Versailles,” Hugo Pontoriero, director of MNAD, told LA NACION. “Nahuel Vecino is inspired by the Errázuriz Palace and its Versailles-esque echoes; he both revives and questions them. It's a very Argentine view of an absolutely Eurocentric place, and this counterpoint is both valid and innovative.”

The nearly seventy recent works that will be exhibited in four galleries of the museum are now arranged in Vecino's studio in Paternal. Among them are still lifes featuring Tetra Brik containers and cut soda bottles, just like those used to drink Fernet. One includes coins and an eel, in homage to Edouard Manet. Another, a butterfly perched on a two-peso bill.
"There's something devalued about it," observes Vecino, who identifies with what he calls "South American Rococo." According to him, there's something of Eugène Delacroix and Francisco de Goya's Caprichos in the sanguine paintings that will be displayed in the Ballroom. "I also got hooked on the Impressionists, Cézanne, and Gauguin," he adds. "I had a very strong reconnection with them. I've been playing with that dialogue since I was a kid, trying to see if I'm one of them."

He's referring to the masters he discovered in the Pinacoteca de los Genios (Art Gallery of Geniuses), the collection of fascicles published by Codex that his father bought for him on Corrientes Street. “My parents were hippies,” he recalls, “both of them painted. My father was a craftsman who became a goldsmith; he studied fine arts. He was a close friend of Miguel Abuelo, Spinetta, and Fernando Noy. He had a very strange devotion to the great masters of the past and devised a very 20th-century macabre plan: according to the Picasso paradigm, the child had to draw like Michelangelo, learn the great master's technique, and then 'break the form' to be cool, so to speak. My father had that project for me. But I never did that breaking the form.”
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