If the painter Ruben
If the painter Ruben Alterio were to paint himself at a moment of total well-being, he tells me, his painting would look something like what I am seeing before me: a spry, slightly built fellow with a jaunty kerchief around his throat, chopping garlic in a tiny Paris kitchen. He would be gazing out of the kitchen door, across a kind of mezzanine filled with bric-a-brac – a small wooden boat, several candelabra, old iron teapots, family photos – and into the big, light-filled studio lined with large canvases. Tall north-facing windows rise almost five metres to the ceiling. Beyond them, you can make out the bustle of the Boulevard de Rochechouart, Montmartre’s main thoroughfare. Across the street and up the hill is the big white Basilique du Sacré- Coeur. “This whole place is like a painting for me,” says the 67-year-old, speaking French with the heavy accent of a Clockwise from left: The upper level of Alterio’s studio, where he entertains (pasta is his speciality); Alterio wearing his signature style – cravat with a waistcoat and jacket; Renoir in his studio that was in the same building. Facing page: Alterio‘s personal effects line the walls of his studio native Argentinian. “My life is here – every little thing in it means something, and there is nothing in it, no colours, nothing, that displeases me.” The whole scene could have been lifted intact from an old sepia-toned photo, with Pierre-Auguste Renoir, say, at his easel. You wouldn’t be far off. Renoir did indeed paint here at the end of his life, but not in Alterio’s studio. Renoir’s was a few floors below; you can see the white shutters of what was his apartment from Alterio’s kitchen window. Everything about the studio recalls a bygone Paris – Paris as the art shrine it used to be. For Alterio, it plays an almost sacred role in his own religion, which is painting. “If you go to a church and there’s no altar and the priest isn’t dressed right, how can you believe in God?” he says. PHOTO RENOIR: © MUSEE DU LOUVRE, DIST. RMN-GRAND PALAIS/PATRICE SCHMIDT/ART RESOURCE, NY 54 CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM
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