Antonio Segui

Painter and engraver, Antonio Segui was born in 1934 in Cordoba, Argentina. From 1951 to 1961, he learned painting in Argentina, Spain, France, and he traveled over the world. His first solo exhibition was in Cordoba, in 1957. In 1958, he did a long journey through South and Central America, then he settled in Mexico where he studied the different techniques of engraving. In 1961 he came back to Argentina. In 1963 he moved definitively to Paris, and there he represented his country at the Biennale in Paris. From 1976 to 1983 he has been banned from Argentina because, in his paintings,  he satirized the political situation. During this time, he was living and working in France.
By the beginning of his career, he did expressionist figuration with a lot of ironies. Few a few, the figuration evolved into absurd, jokes, humor, building a kind of theater: on the stage, a man in movement is trying to find his place in the world. He looks like a double of himself. The man wards off death, he takes life seriously. Full of life, under the costumes, he hides a part of his dream.
During the sixties and seventies, he did expressionist and satirizing paintings about the political and sociological history of South America. Above all, Antonio Segui evoked the tragedy of the human condition.
Since the end of the seventies, he has done a series of autobiographic paintings; his subjects are landscapes from Argentina, elephants in Pampa, the anatomy lesson, Paris, the parks at night, or New York. We are questioned by his artworks which are an enigma and still refer to the title of a series «I want you to do the story». That raises questions.
Antonio Segui uses charcoal, pastel, pencil, or pen. He creates a colored and graphic world with urban excitement at the bottom, like in the universe of the comics.
In parallel with his paintings, he produced important artworks on paper, engravings and drawings. In 2005, the firm of graphic arts, National Modern Art Museum showed a retrospective of his artworks on paper.
Segui has a sense of humor, irony, and subtlety. Like his artwork, from where authoritarian dwarfs are looking at us, in a world where humor is only courtesy of horror. Where, for him, memories are experiments.
Antonio Segui died in Buenos Aires in February 2022.