Luis Seoane

LUIS SEOANE LÓPEZ (Buenos Aires, 1910 - A Coruña, 1979).
"Still life". 1969.
Oil on canvas.
Signed and dated in the lower margin.
Provenance: José María Moreno Galván collection.
Measurements: 30 x 40 cm; 33 x 43 cm (frame).

Scene of interior in which the artist arranges a recurrent subject in the history of art as it is the still life. However, he exposes this genre from a modern point of view where the artist plays with the juxtaposition of elemental forms and a range of saturated colors applied in planes that are diluted and independent of objects and realism.
A draftsman, painter, engraver and writer, Luis Seoane was educated in A Coruña, where he worked as a lawyer and was a member of the Partigo Galeguista, and in 1936 he settled in Buenos Aires. In his youth he participated in the political and cultural activity of the students of A Coruña and, according to the historian and journalist Carlos Fernández Santander, Seoane could be the author who, under the pseudonym of Hernán Quijano, wrote "Galicia Mártir. Episodes of the white terror in the Galician provinces", a book published in Paris and Argentina in 1938. In 1932 he graduated in Law and Social Sciences in Santiago de Compostela, and during these years he began his career in various fields. Thus, between 1927 and 1933 he militated in republican and autonomist left-wing parties, illustrated books and magazines and held his first exhibitions. In 1934 he returned to A Coruña from Santiago and began to work as a lawyer, while sharing gatherings with Huici, Cebreiro, Fernández Mazas, Del Valle, Julio J. Casal, Francisco Miguel and others. That same year he joined the Partido Galeguista. Two years later he took part in the campaign for the Statute of Autonomy, but when the war broke out he was forced to flee to the Argentine capital. Once settled in Buenos Aires, he kept in touch with other compatriots exiled from Franco's regime, among them the painter Leopoldo Nóvoa and the activist María Miramontes. In 1937 he published his first book there, "Trece estampas de la traición". Three years later he founded the collections "Hórreo" and "Dorna" in EMECÉ Editores, and in 1943 he created the magazine "Correo Literario" and Editorial Nova. Two years later, his "Homenaje a la Torre de Hércules" (Homage to the Tower of Hercules) was awarded in New York. In 1948 he founded the publishing house Botella al Mar, and the following year he made a trip to Europe and exhibited in London. Between 1952 and 1962 he exhibited in New York, founded the magazine "Galicia Emigrante" and the publishing house Citania, and was awarded prizes such as the medal of the Universal Exhibition of Brussels, the medal of the Senate of the Argentine Nation (1958) or the Palanza Prize (1962). At the same time, he worked for the Buenos Aires gallery Gordons, directed by Roberto Mackintosh, an expert and connoisseur of his work. In the last decades of his life he alternated his residence in America with trips to Galicia, and in 1977 the first complete edition of his poetic work was published. Between 1963 and 1979 he held exhibitions in Spain, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Brazil and other countries. In 1994 the Day of the Galician Letters was dedicated to him, and in 2003 the Galician Center of Contemporary Art, in Santiago de Compostela, dedicated an important retrospective exhibition to him, which was later taken to the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires. He is currently represented in the Caixanova Collection, among many others.