Vision Quest

His work has been called transcendental. Ethereal. Meditations on canvas that coaxes the viewer into a quiet place of contemplation.

And that is exactly what Arturo Mallmann wants you to do: Be still and lose yourself for a moment in his art, in that wispy place between water and air, between earth and sky. If you are quieted, so be it. If it tears at your soul, Mallmann understands. He has lived in that space for most of his life,

“Since I was a kid I always wanted to go to places where I could look very far away, be it the mountains, the ocean or the never ending horizon of the Argentinean Pampas. I never knew what to say when people asked me what was I looking at. I guess that what I liked was precisely that there was nothing in particular to look at; it was a great feeling of liberation for my frequently turbulent soul,” Mallmann once wrote.

These vivid words graphically describe the driving force behind his life and his art. From the elegant, German-influenced quarter of Buenos Aires where he grew up to the sordid streets of downtown Los Angeles, and stops through hippie communes on Lake Titicaca and an Israeli kibbutz, Mallmann seems to have been searching all his life for a way to express his sense of connection to—or alienation from— the world around him.

“From very early on it was very hard for me to adapt to the [traditional] Argentinean mentality,” says Mallmann. “There was this German stereotype back then and, even though I was and felt Argentinean, the kids at school made fun of me. I felt isolated from the beginning.”

It’s perhaps that sense of isolation, or aloneness in the world, that drives his creativity towards paintings where the human figure appears alone, delicately traced as in a misty, dreamy shadow where the immensity of landscape and colored textures brings us close to the wonder and might of nature. It’s almost a depiction of man’s passing through this world unburdened and unmasked by clutter, noise and superficiality. Indeed, the beautiful paradox of Mallmann’s work is that despite his multi-layered, laborious technique—Mallmann spreads and polishes coat after coat after coat of epoxy over his developing, tiny human shapes and surreal, landscapes—he cuts across any temptation of banality and presents before the viewer man and nature at their most simple, pure being.

It wasn’t always like that, however. Like his shiny paintings that evolve through a superposition of layers, his own journey towards the present is built upon a tortuous path and a plethora of experiences, each one of them a veneer conforming his introspective passage through the world. While anybody growing up in or embracing a multicultural environment can attest to the rewards, they recognize the struggles that come with the search for identity, Mallmann’s experience vividly underscores not only that but, at a larger level, the predicament of many societies to understand, accept and welcome pure diversity. His travels through Bolivia and Peru and his contact with the local people, the international hippie communities settled around Lake Titicaca and his discovery of the Beatnik culture during his late teens, helped him understand and process his own feeling of cultural and personal alienation, but also that of his fellow countrymen.

“For the first time I felt I could communicate with people from other cultures,” he says. “I realized that my difficulty to understand my identity was not just mine. To some extent it was also the plight of my own country Argentina, yearning for a clear identity. I felt less alone.”

Yet, still he wasn’t ready for art. It wasn’t until after Argentina’s military coup, where Mallmann’s family lost most of its properties – and he almost lost his life at the hands of the dictatorship – that he decided to leave the country.

He traveled through Europe (Portugal, Spain, France, Greece), the Middle East (Israel, Egypt) and the United States. Painting was still not part of his world. It was only after his return to Argentina in the early eighties and a strong depression that almost killed him that he met his first wife and took up painting.

He was 30.

With his newly found stability which included a home of his own and two daughters, his art began to sell successfully. But it came crashing down when Argentina entered a period of prolonged economic depression, forcing him to leave, yet again, this time with his family. Settling in Los Angeles with the relatively meager proceeds from the sale of their house he struggled to get by. Perhaps inspired by his inner demons and the bleakness of his immediate situation, Mallmann’s work of this period was inspired by “apocalyptical images of the city,” as he puts it, the dark alley side of urban decay. Collectors liked it and it become very popular within a certain niche of art buyers. He came across art critic Margarita Nieto, who introduced his work to the Iturralde Gallery in Los Angeles, which would become his gallery for years to come.” I was selling everything I sent them,” he says. It was 1994.

It was not after Skid Row (1998), somewhat of an end-of-an-era exhibit devoted to the underbelly of LA, that he began to introduce color in his work. “I went back inside, to my interior world”, says Mallmann. It was the beginning of his new path, marked by an increasingly personal style forged on the painstaking layering of epoxy coats and the dreamy quality of his human characters. He continued painting houses for a living until 2005, when he left Iturralde gallery and started exhibiting at Berman/Turner Projects, also in Los Angeles. “I had about two months worth of money to sustain myself,” says Mallmann, who by now had divorced his wife, “so I decided to devote myself full time to my art.”

He continues evolving; “I notice that more and more I am doing things that have an apocalyptic tone,” he says.” It’s almost as if he were tiptoeing into a world from the future, a sort of post-Blade Runner scenario —without the grimness, just a suggestive desolation. “But I don’t want to move too fast for my collectors”, he adds. “They still like that feeling of solitude.”