Decor & Style, March 2002
by Sheila Johnson


Alfredo Antognini likes to say that as a baby he was rocked to sleep by the soulful sound of the tango. Perhaps that is why today some of his best paintings and etchings portray men and women locked in the dance's stiff embrace, the women in fiery red or orange dresses, the men in formal suits, their hair slicked back, their mustaches flaring. The pictures are at once sexy and sad. The backgrounds are often dark and smoky, as befits a dance-hall or a bar, and off to one side there is a dimly lit upright piano or a bandoneon player sitting on a kitchen chair. In one painting, behind the tango couple there is a veritable line-up of people watching them: a cardinal, a nun, a military officer, and a prostitute. "They represent," he says, "the sad history of my country, Argentina."

Antognini admits that these paintings are for him works of nostalgia, because except for a brief visit in 1990, he has not lived in Argentina since October, 1975, when he accepted a UNESCO scholarship to study art restoration in Mexico City. In March of 1976 Argentina's military coup occurred and people such as he and his wife, both from well-to-do, liberal, intellectual households were regularly being "disappeared." In 1990, when the Organization of American States sponsored an exhibition of his paintings in Buenos Aires both Antogninis returned, but by then they felt like strangers. "Half of our generation was gone."

Alfredo Antognini was born in Buenos Aires, where his father was a banker. Both he and his wife-to-be were studying philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires, and he was only one year shy of becoming a professor, when she saw a sketch he'd done of her and recognized his talent. She gave him a box of paints and brushes for his birthday, and with her encouragement (and without the knowledge of his father) he applied and was admitted to the School of Fine Arts. He spent seven years there, receiving an M.A. in drawing in 1971 and an M.A. in painting in 1974. In 1971 he also managed to finish his doctorate in philosophy. The artists he most admired in those days (and still today) were Matisse, Picasso, Vuillard, Morandi, Cezanne, Degas, and Delacroix, and also an Argentine painter named Butler (pronounced Bootler in Argentinian Spanish), who was then in his 70s and living in Buenos Aires. Antognini wanted to take lessons from Butler but the old man said he was no longer taking students. However, he did agree to look at Antognini's work and encouraged him to go on painting.

In 1977, when this UNESCO scholarship ended and the Antogninis found themselves in Mexico City unable to go home, they had to find a place to live. "We thought we would probably wind up in Europe," he says. "My parents on both sides are Italian, and my wife's are half-Italian and half-Belgian. So we thought we could probably get citizenship in either Italy or Belgium. But we had some American friends in Mexico City, and they advised us to try the U.S. first. They came from a town called La Jolla, and so that is where we went and decided to stay."

From 1977 to 1987, the Antogninis lived in a converted garage on Cuvier Street in La Jolla, three blocks from the beach. "We walked every day on the beach, and many of my paintings began to reflect this." His beach paintings are sunny and full of life: people of all races and sizes reading, or lying on towels, or playing with their dogs. One painting (completed well before 9/11) shows a man and his dog sitting on the beach, but on the horizon one sees a long line of grey destroyers . . . not an uncommon sight in San Diego.

While Antognini continued to paint, he devoted about half of his time to art restoration in order to make a living. Work comes to him from dealers, galleries, and private individuals who need to have paintings cleaned, mended, or retouched. He says this work is entirely different from painting-from composing and making a picture oneself-but of course restoration draws on his enormous knowledge of media (what sorts of paints were used by different artists, and in different periods) and styles.

Reviews and Articles:
From The San Diego Union-Tribune, October 9, 2002
From The San Diego Union-Tribune, April 11, 2002
From Decor & Style, March 2002
From El Cronista Comercial, July 23, 1990
From La Prensa; Semanario de Artes Visuales, July 29, 1990
From Artweek, August 23, 1986



Antognini often restores older religious paintings, and although he is not particularly religious himself, Christian iconography seeps into his own work in interesting ways. One of his beach scenes is, in effect, a modern version of the temptation: Adam is seated on a beach chair while Eve, standing, offers him an apple. In a corner, quite unobtrusive but unmistakable, there is a black squiggle that could be a piece of driftwood but is almost certainly a snake.

"I am also interested in the erotic subtext of some religious paintings," Antognini says, "for example St. Sebastian pierced by arrows, or Judas's kiss." Some recently completed etchings could qualify as homoerotic scenes even though they are firmly based on Biblical or legendary themes.

Antognini loves not only the tango but also classical music, so it is a great sadness for him that starting in his late teens he began to go deaf. Other deaf painters, such as David Hockney, have suggested that being deprived of the sense of hearing sharpens one's sight as an artist, but Antognini says he doesn't believe it. He blesses the invention of the digital hearing aid, both for its silences as well as its ability to bring him music and speech. He recently completed several paintings of opera singers, one an Italian diva with a very ample bosom and the other a Wagnerian soprano complete with horned helmet and spear (and a white horse galloping across the sky).

In 1987 the converted garage on Cuvier Street was torn down and the Antogninis had to move again. This time they found a small old house in the Golden Hill section of San Diego, close to Balboa Park. The back yard holds a shed that he converted into a studio and storage space for large completed canvases, his etching press, and various pieces of equipment, such as a humidity chamber and a hot table, used in restoration work. When he makes etchings, his wife covers the floor with newspapers to protect it from the sticky black ink, and the press is set up on their dining table. "The paper must be softened in the bathtub so we can't take baths when he is making etchings," she says.

It is clear that both Antogninis have a good sense of humor, which also reveals itself in some of his paintings. They both like to cook, something one might surmise from his many luminous small still lifes of lemons, pomegranates, green peppers and other edibles. "The other day I began to make dinner and couldn't find an onion I was sure I had bought," his wife laughs. "Sure enough, there it was, posing for Alfredo. So of course I had to change the recipe because I couldn't very well make him start over with a different onion."

In 1983 the Antogninis became the parents of a daughter who has just graduated from Stanford and is an excellent violinist. They also have a black labrador (who often shows up in Antognini's paintings) and two cats: an elderly Siamese and an adopted stray.