JUAN ANTONIO VARESE
Comienzos de la pintura en Uruguay. Montevideo. Editorial Planeta. 2024.
In 4° (23,8 x 16,5 cm), 294 pp. Paperback publisher binding with flaps.
The prominent historian of Uruguayan photography this time gives us a panoramic view composed of the painting of his homeland at the beginning of his life. As in good photographic records, each section of the image is enjoyed by going through the details. This is what Varese has achieved by using as a source for his new book the commercial advertisements published in local newspapers from the beginning of the State, back in the late 1820s, until the 1860s.
His story was born in parallel to the research carried out on the first steps of photography; dazzled - as he admits - by the good number of advertisements and articles about foreign and national draftsmen and painters, miniaturists and lithographers located in those printed pages, he also applied himself to document each of these signs and that corpus gathered several years ago became in a pleasant introduction to painting in the Eastern Republic of Uruguay. Of course, each sign exhumed from the old Uruguayan press was an incentive to trace in biographies, essays and other newspapers, forming stories and life stories that place us in the Uruguay of yesteryear, linked to our country to the point that numerous artists resided on both banks of the Plata.
His passion for the constant search for information, this time received the assistance of historian Carolina Porley, author of the prologue.
A book to enjoy.