“Before oblivion”: our critique of artist Gerardo Chávez’s memoir

“Antes del olvido”, the memoirs of the painter and sculptor Gerardo Chávez (Trujillo, 1937), are articulated under a double aspiration: to unravel the creation of a rich imaginary world of indomitable essences, and at the same time to illustrate a personality in search of his liberation within a real world marked by injustice and repression. The vital tools for that rebellion against that established order are eroticism, a political activism opposed to dogma and the voracious and unstoppable vocation that has materialized one of the most relevant works of our art. This proposal results in a highly sensitive confession inscribed on a texture composed of generosity, passion and disturbing visions.

The autobiographies of plastic artists are not very common among us (in reality, this is a genre that has been little practiced in Peru). The closest reference is “Life without an owner” (2017), the memoirs of Fernando de Szyszlo, a pedantic, irritating text written from a calculated shell that prevents any hint of humanity. Szyszlo’s voice, impregnated with reactionary nostalgia, gives the sensation of being in front of a talking statue sure of his immortal condition. Chavez’s book is quite the opposite: we find there stirring, warm material: the remembrance of the harsh but exciting origins, the evocation of the youthful risk to achieve a suitable expression, the constant gratitude, the wonder of verifying the findings that will establish a vision original and non-transferable, the shadow of death as a generator of images that challenge and combat it with courage.

Like Sérvulo Gutiérrez, another of our unavoidable painters, Chávez’s childhood, full of economic difficulties, was marked by the death of his mother, which forced him to accept the guardianship of relatives of all stripes, benevolent like his grandmother and terrible like her stepmother Josefina. Those first years, shaken by violent and dark images, elbowed in a gloomy presence that mercilessly erased close beings in the northern landscape where he grew up, provided Chávez with the foundations with which he would build his admirable creative universe. He eloquently narrates his escape from that rural world that he considered increasingly desolate, his arrival in Trujillo, his brilliant studies in Lima and, after arduous predicaments and privations, his arrival in Europe, precisely in Paris. There his contact with the avant-garde will be decisive.

“Before oblivion” is, to a large extent, a space for gratitude and homage. Chavez never brags about his famous friendships, refusing to parade them like a rare flower in his boutonniere. When he alludes to Roberto Matta, his main mentor, he does it this way: “I couldn’t believe that life put this extraordinary man in my path. Matta opened me up to the world. He enlightened me. He changed the course of my life.” The portrait of the great Chilean surrealist is that of a providential father who saves his artistic son from the various tribulations of the trade. At the same time, he becomes a heavy influence that Chavez decides to put aside in favor of following his own course. André Breton and Wifredo Lam are also recognized as references, although at the same time a prudential distance is formulated with the label of “surrealist painter”: “my thing does not have to do only with dreams and the unconscious. Besides, I don’t have that rebellious temperament of the surrealists”.

This last statement is questionable. Chávez shows himself to be a rebellious being, aware that the world is poorly made and that from his political actions and from the twists and turns of his creations he can modulate a protest that in some cases is transfigured into concrete facts. He reaffirms his sympathy for the old APRA, recounts his participation in the great mobilizations of the sixties and agrees to be “complainer by nature” in circumstances that require a pronouncement. After recapitulating an unusually rich and intense life, Gerardo Chávez closes his memoirs with undefeated passion, willing to continue until the last breath, because “inactivity is death for me.” Against oblivion and inevitable disappearance, this testimony is an important complement to a fundamental work.

The token

Author: Gerardo Chavez

Title: “Before oblivion”

Publisher: Alfaguara

Year: 2022

Pages: 146

Relationship to the author: none.

Rating: 4 stars out of 5 possible.

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