The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra Read Free Page A

simplification of life to the bare essentials, which meant he could carry on doing what he liked without hindrance.
    When Holt returned to Europe, he left my father a large quantity of paint and a long roll of canvas that he had not used. Holt himself would cut pieces off this roll and stretch them on rectangular frames to paint on. Salvatierra though decided to use the entire roll to paint a lengthy depiction of the river, without cutting it up. That was his first roll. He was twenty when he began.

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    The first thing we did before we left was to pay Aldo a few pesos for him to look after the canvases and keep the shed intact. A short time later, Luis and I were able to leave our affairs in Buenos Aires behind and return to Barrancales. Luis had no difficulty escaping from his notary office. I was divorced and my only son was living in Barcelona, so all I had to do was close the real estate office for a few days—I was doing hardly any business anyway.
    We installed ourselves in our parents’ last house, which was still for sale. It was close to the river, five blocks from my father’s shed. With Aldo’s help, we spent our days lowering and raising the rolls of canvas, using the system of pulleys and an apparatus for lifting engines that Salvatierra had found in a former car repair shop. We calculated that each roll must weigh around a hundred kilos. Luis said we were getting old, and we laughed because the simple act of rolling up our sleeves to do some physical work put us in a better mood.
    When each canvas was lowered to the ground, we unrolled it and Luis took photos of different fragments. His idea was to send the images with a letter to the provincial authorities insisting they come up with the promised subsidy, or if that failed, to ask for support from a foundation or museum interested in backing an exhibition.
    It would have been impossible to exhibit the entire canvas in one place, but we thought it could go on display in segments. Two sequences had been shown in Buenos Aires for a short while in the sixties, but Salvatierra had not wanted to be present. He had always felt the odd man out, a figurative painter among non-figuratives, a provincial among artists from the capital, a practitioner among theorists. Besides, those were the days of installations and happenings: aesthetic concerns that were alien to him. On another occasion, his friend Doctor Dávila took a section to an art biennial in Paraná, after he and my father agreed that if his work won they would share the prize money. And it did win. We all went to the ceremony. Salvatierra felt very awkward, and never exhibited again. He wasn’t interested, and anyway it interrupted his daily work. He didn’t want recognition, he wouldn’t have known how to handle it: he felt it had nothing to do with the task he had allotted himself.
    I think he saw his work as something too personal, a kind of intimate diary, an illustrated autobiography. Possibly because he was mute, he needed to tell himself his own story. To recount his own experience in one never-ending mural. He was content with painting his life; he had no need to show it. For him, living his life was to paint it.
    I also believe (something I only understand now) that he was perhaps slightly embarrassed at the immensity of his work, its outsize dimensions, how grotesquely gigantic it was: almost more like a hoarding vice or obsession than a finished work of art.
    With Luis we decided that rather than send out photos with an accompanying letter, it would be better to put together a leaflet showing some fragments of the canvas, alongside an explanation and an image of Salvatierra. We also decided to include a photograph of the shed with the hanging rolls, to give some idea of the extent of the work and my father’s project.
    It proved very difficult to choose how to frame the different sections of the canvas, because Salvatierra painted without any lateral divisions so as to achieve continuity