Christian MacEntyre Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1967 -

Christian Roy María Mac Entyre was born on July 3, 1967 in the “porteño” neighborhood of Barracas, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Plastic artist, self-taught and color-blind. Born to plastic artist Eduardo Mac Entyre and music lover María Carmen Apicella. In 1984 he graduates from Colegio Cardenal Cisneros to take up graphic design at Universidad de Buenos aires.

Strongly inclined to music from a very early age, he learns to play the guitar and the cello, which would leave a decisive mark on his work. Plastic art and music would thus shape his main interest areas. Humanities and philosophy have also been of great importance in his career.

Having been in contact with art since childhood, he decides, in 1997, to exclusively devote himself to painting. It is then when he is selected together with 49 artists out of 1280 candidates for the first international contest TANGO, a mega exhibit in the Argentine rooms of Palais de Glace.

His work stands out for its variety and extension of several different moments. Along these lines, there is a temporal succesion of marines, still-lifes and imaginary landscapes, which he develops always starting from a basic concept, “the stain” - a way or process of original interpretation. Such concept gets to the artist as suggestions and hints of new ways to reach thus the resolution of the work of art.

At first, dancers of the “porteña” music, TANGO. This style, in which loneliness, nostalgia and seduction are most vivid, as well as the suburban atmosphere in which it is born, is represented in each painting. It allows the artist to express his taste for shapes and movements, moulding them in different ways and thus succeeding in capturing a series where the poetry of the chiaroscuro, figuration and surrealism are present on the canvas, oftentimes freezing action at the moment of the tensest expression.

At a second stage, a series stands out that is based in geometric abstraction, in which the most striking features are woman’s curves and man’s straight lines, infrequent backgrounds, diagonals (expanding space), sensuous tansparencies, sensitive fadings, lights and certain postures that enables the artist to transmit the rhythm, the sensuousness and the melancholy of such dance. He associates diagonals with tension and straight lines with rhythm.

At a third stage, lines and planes that accompany the most abstract figure are added, generating the sensation of movement and displacement. The figures come in succession, everything is present. The look seems to be dragged towards another shape and there is a succession of scenes, representing the magic of movement on the static canvas.

Furthermore, he has turned the guitar in a sort of muse, such instrument being one of the main protagonists of his work in accordance with his love of music. The guitar gives way to a visual sonority in a harmonious, perfect combination of colors-sounds, spaces-silences, shapes- tunes that come together in a unifying visual art of ambivalent meaning: colors and shapes have tunes, making his paintings visual melodies and taking them from abstraction to constructivism and from geometry to collages made with real guitar pieces.

Every guitar is a sort of peephole through which the spectator sees other music and a melody that will finally be completed by themselves. This, in the same way as musical art went from Debussy’s impressionism to Scriabin’s search of colored notes deriving, in the times of cubism, in Stravinsky’s neoclassicism..

And there is a moment of recent creation with kinetic pieces and optical art, in which there is a play between appearance and reality. What one first gets hides several facets and changes as one goes over the piece. The image changes and gets distorted, thus drawing a parallelism between the way one perceives things consciously, unconciously and shapes or distorts reality. All this with the addition of sculptures expressed in a dramatic language of tension.

Departing from his natural interest, the necessity to investigate and his tendency to be attracted to different techniques or themes, materials and means for the resolution of his work, the artist tries to silently obey his own intenal dictation, while always searching for sincere means of expression, which are appropriate to his temperament and talents.

In this way, all along his work, we can see processes not only of creation with a salient expressive spontaneity but also with a prominent introspection above all.

This makes him - no doubt - an artist who is led rather by his own sensitivity and requirements than by the sheer final result. In other words, the quest for expression does not force the artist to follow a style or a line in a certain production. On the contrary, that production turns out to be a by-product of the original inspiration, regardless of any coherence with the previous style.