“Each artist has a language. When I started, I never imagined that everything that happened to me was ever going to happen. If there’s a secret, I think it’s that you always have to keep moving, searching, and trying to transcend. The year 2005 was key for me: I entered the market of Buenos Aires, which though is a small market if compared with those of the rest of the world, it was great that my work could be seen in many places. I went to Buenos Aires to try my luck. I said to myself: I want to make a living as an artist. And it turned out just fine”, stated renowned Argentine visual artist Milo Lockett in a recent interview. And he should know. For he’s quite a phenomenon as regards not only his art, but also as a social actor.
For starters, he’s one of the most sought-after visual artists of Argentina — he sells hundreds of works per year; he paints on canvas, but also on sculptures, sneakers, mugs, buildings, furniture, and T-shirts; he was the revelation of the ArteBA fair back in 2006, and only three years later he was chosen as artist of the year — together with León Ferrari. His work has been exhibited in countless galleries locally, but also abroad, and his admirers come from all walks of life.
Yet Milo Lockett likes to be seen as a social referent as he’s strongly involved in many ongoing projects for the needy: free painting workshops in the provinces of Chaco, Jujuy, Corrientes, Misiones, Santa Fe and Buenos Aires, but also in Paraguay and Brazil. He donates some forty paintings per year to auctions to raise funds for the Hospital Pediátrico of Resistencia, Chaco, the city where he lives since his birth back in 1967. And believe it or not, there’s much more.
What’s even better is that such multifaceted, prolific individual has been skilfully portrayed in the Argentine documentary Rey Milo, produced and directed by Federico Bareiro. Following a very well executed conventional mould, Bareiro interviews the artist himself, friends, collaborators, art critics, and gallery owners (among others), and intersperses their eloquent testimonies with significant scenes of the artist at work, be it in his own workshop or in those organized outside, such as one he conducted with teenagers with Down Syndrome who painted the walls of the school for the Wichi community of Chaco.
So not only you see putting hands to work, but you also have a chance to get familiar to how he personally relates to those who academically know little or nothing about art, and yet much predisposition and energy to make a social transformation through art — something that to Milo is more important than art itself. After all, he says he feels he’s done everything he could do art wise, and would now like to retire to fully devote himself to social work — without involving politics in it.
Unlike so many recent documentaries, Rey Milo is also accomplished in formal terms. Thanks to the use of wide angle lenses, spaces are rendered in all their dimensions, so many frames of the film look like paintings brimming with primary, saturated colours. Interviewees are also sometimes bathed in red or blue, with the kind of lighting that brings forward shapes and volumes. But don’t get me wrong: this is no flashy experiment in formalism, it appropriately doesn’t want to be one.
Instead, it’s the manner chosen by the filmmaker to accompany the film’s subject with an agreeable set of aesthetics that would never eclipse it. For it’s all about Milo Lockett, the man behind the artist.
