San Diego Union-Tribune, April 11, 2002
by Robert L. Pincus


Couples doing the tango is one of Alfredo Antognini's perennial subjects, but the figures never look as if they are in the midst of some flashy move. Instead, they seem to be under the spell of some powerful daydream, modeled in clay or plaster.

The mood of these paintings is wistful, tender and a bit eerie. It's as if you were standing in a bar or dance hall and everything suddenly slowed and the music faded. They are akin to a scene in a film where a director brings motion to a crawl for symbolic effect.

Antognini's canvases populated by dancers evoke his youth. He was Argentina-born and educated as an artist and scholar in his native land. (He earned a Ph.D. in philosophy as well as a master's degree in art.) Even though he's been a local since 1977, he's virtually unknown as a painter. Antognini has made both a reputation and a living as an art restorer and conservator.

He was trained in art restoration in Mexico City on a UNESCO scholarship when Argentina's notorious military government came to power in a 1976 coup. He and his wife, liberal in their political views, couldn't return home without risking their lives. It was the horrific era of "the disappeared." So taking a suggestion from a friend, they tried La Jolla and made it their home. Since 1987, they have resided in the Golden Hill area of San Diego.

Antognini's solo exhibition at the Porter Troupe Gallery in Hillcrest features a healthy spectrum of his painting: bathers (inspired by the years in La Jolla) and still-lifes, along with tango pictures. The selections are uneven, but the best of them within each genre are intriguing, wholly absorbing pictures.

Although the paintings of dancers are clearly personal, intimately so for Antognini, their poetic qualities are easily accessible. A painting like "Yellow Dress Tango" creates a soothingly tranquil aura, perhaps because the couple in the foreground seems sculptural, set apart from ordinary time.
Still, the couple isn't reduced to monochrome figures, as if done in stone. There is light and color on them and the surrounding scene. The dress shifts from green to yellow. It gleams where the outfit covers breasts and the curve of her back and buttocks. The effect is gently erotic.

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The other couples in "Yellow Dress Tango" fade into a smoky brown background. And in some paintings -- a prime example is "Still Life Tango" -- the dancers nearly merge with their surroundings, since Antognini chooses muted colors for them, too. They also share space with ghostly symbolic figures at the back of the room, such as a cardinal and a man in military garb.

Antognini's influences are mostly modernist. There's a little bit of Balthus, the late Swiss painter, as well as a trace of Diego Rivera. But Antognini sublimates stylistic inspirations to a richer engagement with each subject.

The distinguished art critic John Berger recently wrote, "The impulse to paint comes from . . . the encounter between painter and model -- even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles."

Berger's perceptive point applies well to still-lifes that possess their own life. Not all of Antognini's do, but the best of his paintings of fruit and table-top arrangements have a palpable vitality. He achieves a sensuous interpretation of pomegranates, in all their radiant redness, in "Pomegranates on Black." An austere background, an arrangement of dark straight-edge blocks, places a forceful accent on the roundness and color of the fruit.

Muted surroundings play a larger role in a painting like "Saucer, Cup, Onion." The named forms appear in a tidy horizontal row, shelf giving way to wall just above them. The poetic simplicity of this and other compositions owes something to the enduring Giorgio Morandi -- for Antognini an acknowledged influence. But he has his own lively way with the object, be it orgainic or man-made, that transcends style and becomes the sort of encounter that Berger praises.

Light is brighter in Antognini's beach scenes. Their subject matter is locally inspired, but the look is Continental -- incorporating everything from classical Greek art to the Picasso bathers of the '20s. There's something antique about the figure in the wry "Coronado With Dog." The subtle sculptural qualities of the figures in his tango pictures becomes explicit. It's as if the dark brown male figure sat in the sun so long he didn't just get a tan; he turned to clay. The black dog still seems more like an animal than object, and military ships on the horizon form a tidy little pattern.