Carpani, Life and Works

Showing at the Mar del Plata Film Festival: Carpani, Life and Works, directed by Doris Carpani

Synopsis from the film festival's website:

Ricardo Carpani (obvious but necessary to say) was an artist who lived intentionally perceiving since adolescence, his transit through the planet. Knowing his work is to enter an overwhelming and consistent body of images among which unusual possibilities become intermingled. For example, a “porteño” (him) who reads the folded newspaper sustained in his left hand while he leans his shoulder on an elephant; or the surrounding forest with intermingling Indians, warriors, missionaries and the ineffable “carpaniana” zoology, or the Centaurs Gauchos, or series of lovers, or his honor in defense of the popular classes, or the shrill cries of anguish over the missing, or his murals in which the combat jumps of the canvas or the wall for us ... Critic Rafael Squirru considered Carpani´s work “transcendental.” And in another moment he said: “I have no doubt that Carpani has contacted his own cosmic force.” That view we fully share, appears in the film by his wife Doris and Jerónimo Carranza. The vital knowledge about the artist has turned into a film that, though it is, can not be regarded simply as a documentary work, because its resolution, the technique used and the precise effects make of this movie of about 90 minutes a reliable portrait and a great work of this author. Carpani was a man who took care of the destitute and downtrodden but not of the submissive. It is said that his figures seemed cut in stone. This must be the metaphor that corresponds to his oeuvre: “This work is indestructible.”