Right and facing page: family photos find a place among the ephemera – Alterio has two children, his son is also a painter in Paris Alterio has been producing his large canvases here for over 30 years. They are forceful pieces, with sweeping brushstrokes and a kind of interior glow. He starts with the canvas flat on the floor and swipes a layer of watercolour across it with a large brush attached to a stick, like a broom. Later, he’ll rework the canvas with oil paint. This technique is called gras sur maigre – fat on thin – and he uses it to give his paintings their wonderful luminosity. It’s obvious that Paris is where Alterio had to end up. As a young man, he followed his father into the painting line and studied at the Buenos Aires School of Fine Arts. He played jazz clarinet in bars around town. But Alterio’s Buenos Aires was a stuck-up place and sniffy toward bohemians like him. “In Argentina, you’ve got to be at least 50 before they let you do anything,” Alterio says. “If you want to play the clarinet, they say, ‘Who is your professor?’ You can’t just play the clarinet.” And then there was Chez Tatave, a local dive straight out of a dream: the owner wore a beret, the ceiling had surrealist eyes painted all over it, and in the middle of everything was a genuine colonne morris – one of those green columns plastered with posters that are to pictures of Paris what cable cars are to images of San Francisco. “For me, this place was Paris,” Alterio says reverently. Still, he didn’t get there directly. There were a few years in Rio – “too big and too exotic,” Alterio says. “You felt like you were in the jungle!” He came to Europe only to pick up some papers for his father and was ready to take a flight home to Buenos Aires from Orly Airport. “I remember it was August. I was at the airport. And suddenly I said, ‘I am not getting on that plane. ’ Et puis – voilà! Here I am.” As you might guess, Alterio’s studio has history, too. A century ago, it housed a workshop that produced engravings for Picasso, Matisse and Miró. Alterio’s wife’s grandmother – stay with me here – was the sister of the Picasso engravers. The engravers moved across the boulevard, but they kept the studio, and Alterio eventually took over the lease. He’s made it the centrepiece of a life that might have come directly from the fantasies he spun at Chez Tatave. He’s made fashion illustrations for luxury book publisher Prosper Assouline’s magazine La Mode en Peinture; he’s designed sets and costumes for the ballet Don Quichotte at the Opéra de Marseille; and he’s made some killer French friends – a photo of actress Isabelle Adjani that photographer André Rau gave him hangs on the wall. And, of course, he paints, the central activity that he refers to as “mon grand bateau”. His work has appeared in shows “This whole place is like a painting for me. My life is here – every little thing in it means something” Left: some of Alterio’s sketches – he keeps them all. Right: a view from the studio, located in the 9th Arrondissement 56 CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM
SPECIAL PROMOTION NOTEWORTHY What to have. Where to go. MANDARIN ORIENTAL: A CHIC HK RETREAT A Hong Kong getaway has never looked so enticing: take in some of Central’s most exclusive shopping, sensational Michelin-starred dining at Amber and a night in our newly launched ultraexclusive Apartment Suite – plus flexible check in and check out times. For details or reservations please call +852 2132 0088 or email lmhkg-reservations@mohg.com at Art Chicago, Paris’s Centre Pompidou, Stadtmuseum Berlin and Malba, the Latin American Art Museum of Buenos Aires. “We reinvent ourselves in Paris,” Alterio says, but almost nobody does any more. The idea itself comes from another time. But Alterio did, and when you look out of his tiny kitchen, over the bric-a-brac and into his studio, you can see why, once upon a time, so many people wanted to. rubenalterio.com OPPORTUNISTIC INVESTMENTS Attalis Capital acts as an adviser to UHNW, family offices and global investment funds to assist in the origination and structuring of m to m+ investments in Australian real estate debt, high conviction ASX equity opportunities and private equity. attaliscapital.com
