Characters

Author of work unique in both technique and motif, Leónidas Gambartes was a fundamental part of the movement for artistic renewal in the city of Rosario. Self-taught, he was a member of the Plásticos de Vanguardia group in the nineteen-thirties and, shortly thereafter, he, along with Antonio Berni and others, formed the Mutualidad Popular de Estudiantes y Artistas Plásticos. He reached maturity as a creator in the late nineteen- forties, when he and Juan Grela founded the Litoral group. It was in 1949 that he produced his first work in an unmistakable technique he developed that consisted of applying plaster and gesso to the canvas and then painting on that base in oil and watercolor. Using that technique, he produced "Personajes", which depicts a small repertoire of birds and odd animals that, like all of the creatures in his works, seem rooted in cave painting. A painter of superstition, magic, and “the memory of the earth” (as he once phrased it), he represented his neighborhood in Rosario and the region’s culture with elements from pre-Columbian legends and fantasy based on his memory of the stories his father had told him when he was a child.