Gaston Ugalde - INFO

The salar is a ritual space. When you meet
him, and see it for the first time, you are
paralyzed: the energetic flow of salt and
its own rites begin to penetrate and wrap
you and that is where you return to the
meaning, but you are already different,
and the Salar has transfigured you.
Gastón Ugalde, the Bolivian artist: multidisciplinary,
multi-awarded, itinerant,
nomadic expressive and nomadic existential,
creative without a cure, lover-poet
and warrior as he himself liked to define
himself. In his pilgrimage he’s made the
art of Bolivia – the faces of the land, coca
leaves, peasant and indigenous marches,
stone, Aguayo – the raw material of all
his creations.
But if the Salar de Uyuni melts space,
time, matter, mystery and cosmos in a
single dimension, it also marked Gastón
in its course.
For Gastón, the Salar is mother and
father at the same time. His undoubted
inordinateness of spirit for almost
everything is found in the Salar – a
sanctuary of emptiness par excellence –
an undoubted psychic and experiential
correspondence. There, everything
happens, can happen, was happening –
even though it is only salt, stones, wind,
cactus, sky. Gastón, appealing to the
fundamental weapon that every genuine
artist treasures, knew how to make this
extreme area, of these icy deserts and that
at the same time burn you, a new world,
an artistic world, a world where the only
possible limit was that of the human
creativity. A world where the creation of
the self was envisioned, knotted, fused,
with the most wonderful of the works
ever conceived: Nature.
I was once asked to write a thousand
characters on Gastón Ugalde. I will just
say: Gaston is the most creative, not only
of all Bolivian artists alive, but of all
Bolivians.
Gastón has a fire, a thrust, an art, which
I feel and admire. He has been able to
synthesize Cecilio, Marina, Chueco,
Túpac Katari, and throw them into
infinity, from the present to the future –
just like the making and the promise that
encompasses all art, if it is lived and if it
is genuine.
The work of Gastón, the work of the
Ugalde, has an undoubted merit: it carries
a brand. He’s from Bolivia. It’s simply his
own. It’s Unique. It is Bolivian. And by
synthesis of the Bolivian, it is universal.
It’s Ugalde. It’s Tembladerani, La Paz.
It’s from the Salar de Uyuni, Potosí. It is
his brand, but it is also of all those who
feel it. It is ours. It is everybody’s. It’s
Unforgettable. It’s art.
That of Gastón Ugalde, beyond all of its
classifications, is only one thing: it is his
life. It is his art. It is art.
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