Fernando Montes; painter & filmmaker
Hyfler/Rosner
Painter of the Bolivian High Andes
The Independent
06 February 2007
David Buckman
http://www.fernandomontes.co.uk/gallery.html
Fernando Montes, painter and film-maker: born La Paz,
Bolivia 14 August 1930; married 1960 Marcela Villegas
Sanchez-Bustamante (one son, one daughter); died London 17
January 2007.
Fernando Montes was a painter whose work, based on extensive
travels in South America, interpreted its terrain and people
for an international audience. His retrospective exhibition
"Spirit of the Andes" at the Mall Galleries in London last
year included powerful, stark images which drew on Bolivia's
strong indigenous intellectual traditions.
First, there were the featureless women of the Bolivian High
Plateau, or Altiplano, rooted in its distinctive sweeping
landscape, haunted by the Andean earth-mother goddess
Pachamama - the distinctive dress of the women and their
accompanying children in silhouette in some pictures giving
them the appearance of mountains and foothills. Secondly,
Montes depicted ancient Andean architecture, unpeopled and
with a timeless, eerie quality.
Fernando Montes was born in La Paz, Bolivia, in 1930, third
child of Hugo Montes, a lawyer and later leader of the
Bolivian liberal party, and his wife Eloisa. His father was
killed in a motoring accident when Fernando was seven, and
he went to live with his maternal grandmother, Sara Minchin,
in Argentina. He recalled the train journey when he "saw
from the carriage window the strange and fantastic
landscapes of the Altiplano, and also the Salar de Uyuni, a
vast salt lake which stretches to the horizon, like a sea of
white".
In the important cultural centre of Buenos Aires, Fernando
began to study painting. At 15 he tried to enter the studio
of the Catalan painter Vicente Puig, an exile from the
Spanish Civil War. Fernando was told to return at 18, as the
studio used a nude model. However, his liberal-minded
grandmother persuaded Puig to take the boy, and he proved a
brilliant but demanding teacher. "All his comments, although
sometimes cruel, were of great depth, simple and intensely
expressive, often with a metaphysical meaning," Montes
recalled:
He revealed to me the importance and excellence of drawing
and an understanding of the human figure. He said: "Art is
an adventure. If you stab, stab to kill", by which he meant
that one had to be deliberate in the way one made marks on
the paper.
Montes returned to La Paz to study philosophy at the
University of San Andrés, then I joined a group of
film-makers, Jorge Ruiz, a childhood friend, and Augusto
Roca, who were pioneers of the film industry in Bolivia. We
journeyed to remote parts of the Altiplano and descended to
the rain forest, where the Moseten tribe of Indians lives.
From the drawings I made, I made a series of paintings about
these people.
He began to paint professionally: portraits, nudes and
landscapes around La Paz. His first exhibition was one of
portraits at La Paz's Galería Municipal in 1956. He
represented Bolivia at the 5th São Paulo Biennial in Brazil
in 1959, the year the Spanish government granted him a
scholarship to the San Fernando School of Fine Arts, in
Madrid.
In 1960 he moved to London, continuing his studies at St
Martin's School of Art and the Central School of Arts and
Crafts. He had his first exhibition outside his native
country in 1965 at the St Martin's Gallery. There were more
portraits, but also London cityscapes and paintings of
people in London pubs. "These were a chance to use the human
figure, which has always fascinated me."
In 1965 Fernando, his wife Marcela and their small son, Juan
Enrique, visited Bolivia and again encountered the
magnificent landscape of my childhood. On seeing the High
Andes with the eyes of a mature person I found myself as an
artist. I started to work on paintings of the Altiplano.
Previously, my landscapes had depicted specific locations,
but now it focused on the essence of the relationship
between the human being and the land.
Eight years later, Montes was asked to participate in the
exhibition "Bolivian Contemporary Painters" at the Musée
d'Art Moderne in Paris. He was particularly moved to see his
painting Women and Land reproduced as a poster around the
city. Montes's work was now being exhibited widely
internationally. An invitation in 1982 to show in Japan
proved important in his development. And in 1987, on an
overland journey from Peru to Bolivia, he saw the famous
Inca citadel of Machu Picchu for the first time. His Machu
Picchu-inspired paintings, along with figures and
landscapes, were exhibited extensively in Italy, in Venice,
Florence, Rapallo and Rome.
Montes continued to work and exhibit regularly, even after
cancer was diagnosed early in 2003. He painted in the
exacting medium of egg tempera, using tiny brushes, making
his own colours, carefully preparing each canvas and often
making his own frames.
In 1999, he represented Bolivia at the 48th Venice Biennial.
As well as the Mall Galleries retrospective last year, he
latterly had two others, in 1999 at the Museo Nacional de
Arte in La Paz and at the Endoh Gohki Museum in Kyoto,
Japan, in 2004.