ABOUT ALPERIN
& HIS ART
Ignacio was born in Argentina, grew up in Australia, and circumstantially lived and traveled throughout Europe, America and Southeast Asia. He professes an early love for masters like Kandinsky, Picasso, Pollock, Van Koenig, Rauschenberg, as well as admiring the clinical genius of Leonardo.
His musical tastes were centered around Jazz, soul, blues and classical, but his heart was mostly with the great bebop and hard bop masters like Evans, Coltrane, Monk, Davis, Pepper, Bird, and the golden era of American voices like Ella, Sinatra, Bennett, Dinah Washington, and Nina Simone.
It is during his early 20´s that he fully develops this love affair with jazz and as a result, complex rhythms, intertwining melodies, and a great deal of new skills and techniques are introduced and developed into his art.
This slow, almost "jazzy" pace of development, also helped him mature his own approaches and techniques and free him from classical ties. It also allowed him to find inspiration in unusual places as he developed his own unique and sensitive voice.
While his synesthesia has given him an edge, providing him with an "aesthetic views" of musical sounds which he has learned to incorporate in a very enchanting and rhythmic fashion into his art.
The result is a well-recognized style, art that has a hidden and well-rehearsed structure within a sea of improvisational skills, rhythms, colors and cadences.
His art is very personal, wonderfully complex and baroque at times, simplified and beautifully succinct at others. His works take on many forms, and yet his hand and his vision are always recognizable.
Like many artists, he has lately and successfully, moved into expanding his artistic vision into a design, and the creation of objects d'art.
His Visual Jazz series has had successful individual and shared exhibitions, as well as private shows, in Argentina, the USA, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Switzerland, and Australia among others (See PRESS).
Our beloved Ella Fitzgerald once said: "Just don't give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don't think you can go wrong.”
When I first met Ignacio Alperin, I was intrigued by the fact that the composition and color treatment in his work, facets that are so visual, are influenced by other senses – that is, the sound and emotional intensity he derives from a variety of musical genres, including Jazz, Soul, Motown, the American songbook, Tango, and the Classics, which fascinated me even more.
Therefore, in my task to adequately capture the artist’s work in words, it is insufficient to use only visual terms. A discussion of contour lines, color, positive and negative space, and abstraction only tells part of the story. To begin to characterize Alperin’s work more fully, it is perhaps more necessary to augment the visual portrayal with musical and emotional metaphors to express his aims and ideals with such passion and free spirit, such as tempo, syncopation, and pitch. The capacity to create multisensory experiences is a gift in the spirit of the true artist who believes in the eternal search for the perfect alchemy of shape, color, and line along with volume, speed, and emotion, and is evidenced by these images that combine the landscapes of sound and sight into captivating works of richness and depth.
The meaning of "symbolist tradition" in art has been used to express a view in which the artist creates works that evoke as well as describe. To quote one of the great masters of this school, Wassily Kandinsky: "The relationships in art are not necessarily ones of outward form but are founded on inner sympathy of meaning." The works of Ignacio Alperin are an exemplary exponent of that view, eliciting the power, joy, and freedom an eternal traveler attains when he seeks to materialize his dreams and to express his views without doubts or fear.
By Alfredo Ratinoff (2018)
Curator & Artist
Former Faculty Member, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC , USA – Senior Curator at Embassy of Argentina, Washington DC and Inter American Development Bank Gallery, Washington DC, USA
What is Visual Jazz?
IA - " I have always felt moved and inspired by music and it has been that sensibility that has pushed me into some of my forms and manners of expressing those artistic needs from an early age. In time I learned that a part of that was the result of my synesthesia. A wonderful gift which has allowed me to translate music into a visual art form and incorporate it somehow into my work. Jazz has always been a big part of my life and as such it has been a main source of inspiration. Thus was born my Visual Jazz series of abstract expressionist paintings purely inspired by music. It is art that looks to translate the power of music into a different art form."
How do you hope this reflects on the people who view your art?
IA - "My hope is that what I do uplifts those who view it, leaving them with a feeling of being hugged and caressed by color, movement, rhythms, cadences and textures, and infused by the energy that I express through them.
That intense and spark like vitality is also a recognition of our brevity as living beings and of our limited, yet strong capabilities, to act as individuals in the preservation of life in general and of this beautiful little blue planet, host of our still brief, in universal terms, human civilization."
You definitely aim high (laughter). Do you really feel that can art accomplish something as difficult as that?
IA - "Well, we do have a civilization that feels often all conquering, and yet, it does not seem capable of resolving matters essential to its very survival as hunger, inequality and environmental sustainability.
I guess that, in my own way, my aim is simply to remind us in a vibrant manner, that life is an extraordinary gift, full of color, contrasts, and change. And that there is a place for all of it in our lives.
Art to me means hope. It is a complex yet simple manner of showing our soul to others. Sharing that nakedness of spirit is one of the ways that allows us to get closer to each other, thus becoming better human beings in the process."
How do you feel about the future of artistic expression?
IA - "There is no other way to feel than very good. If we look throughout history, art has always been one of the saving graces of every passing civilization. Art has always been a redemptive feature of great, as well as small and even destructive civilizations, and art will also be one of our conduits to salvation.
To me, art in its every shape and manner, will always be a part of what takes a society out of darkness and, once again, into the light."
