Candombe

This Candombe scene was painted in 1921, the year when Figari, at the age of sixty,
made a life-changing decision: After a long and brilliant career as a lawyer, legislator, and reformer of art education in Uruguay, he sailed over to Buenos Aires for his first exhibition, held at Müller gallery. Featured in that show, "Candombe" is, because of its size and support, an exception in Figari’s production: He mostly painted on pale yellow or gray pieces of card- board—a support that enabled him to toy with the color of the background and the texture to create opaque surfaces laden with material. This slightly larger painting depicts a frieze of bright and pale colors to yield an ambiguous spatial relationship between the figure and the background. The figures of the dancers stand out against a colorful tapestry of geometric shapes with the celebration’s king and queen barely visible in the back. Figari’s vision of Afro-Uruguayan culture in Montevideo is fruit of his authentic and declared interest in building a new folk tradition for
the Río de la Plata.