About Argatti
A visual artist as much as a painter, Argatti is a man shaped by the city and its sounds. He has always lived in the heart of this bustling, feverish universe, this explosive entity. Everything he paints bears its trace, its effervescent and convulsive stamp. Whence the implacable tension and the taut rhythm of his canvasses and monotypes. A further ingredient is present at the moment of creation and that is music, preferably a certain form of jazz and contemporary composers such as John Adams, Steve Reich or Betsy Jolas.
With Argatti, everything seems to bow to the overriding scansion of large cities, their fleeting lines endlessly intersecting and meeting in space, their dizzying and fascinating perspectives, their conquering architecture. Like musical scores which each day the eye imbues anew with mysterious power... Harmonious or haphazard, the unceasing expanse of the contemporary megalopolis acts as alcohol in stimulating the senses. Never captive in its essence, music similarly propels the spirit into relentless movement, propels it elsewhere to where there is perpetual metamorphosis, constant reformulation. The strange alchemy of sounds has a special echo in the stridency heightened by glass and steel which, come nightfall, is brought to life by an electrical profusion, sending a thousand signals to the painter’s cortex.
But it does happen that concern and questioning overtake sensation to trouble the image of a future yet to be expressed. Then the artist is on the alert, translating his transient anguish with more serious touches and sombre chords. But never does he seem to give up that optimism within himself nor his faith in his fellow man. The energy driving him forward triumphs over all vicissitudes. Then the often acid colours which his palette steals from the night become the beginnings of a dawn already traced across the horizon.
Luis Porquet, Barnevelli-Carteret, 26 May 2007.
