SEGUI Antonio

Antonio SEGUI (born 11 January 1934 in Córdoba, Argentina) is a painter from a family of wealthy traders. He arrived in France in 1951 to study painting and sculpture. In 1952 he also went to study in Spain. In 1957, he made his first solo exhibition in Argentina. In 1958, he made a long journey throughout South and Central America, before moving to Mexico, where he studied engraving techniques. In 1961, he returned to work in Argentina, before finally leaving for Paris in 1963. He now lives in Arcueil in the former property of Emile Raspail. Antonio Segui has also travelled extensively to Africa, from where he has brought back many objects, and he seems particularly interested in elephants. At the beginning of his career, influenced by artists such as George Grosz or Otto Dix, he practised an expressionist figuration from which irony emerged. Gradually, his figuration evolved towards absurdity, building a kind of theatre on the scene where a moving man was killed seeking his place in the world. Facety and humour overpowering existential anguish. He tries to orchestrate in his own way the hopes and follies of an ironic, falsely naive and disturbing human comedy. The soldiers of the Argentine dictatorship eventually prohibited their stay: "I did not try to attack them directly — I am not an activist, I do not believe in committed art — but people who are not very intelligent think that when you are not with them, you are against them. A Latin American artist, each of her works carries in her images of the city, the night and her native country: "I have solved my problems with my mother, with God, but with Cordoba, no! The city remained as it was in my memories, and I always come back in a dream... Using charcoal, pastel, pencil or pen, it makes live on a background of urban agitation, a colorful and graphic world that seems to emerge from the universe of comics.