Naive Painting South American Naive School Painting Signed Nicolàs Rubio Hispano Argentinian Painter

Oil on wood 104 cm x 26 cm sold with its integrated frame and also painted by the artist, namely the Spanish-Argentine painter, writer and filmmaker Nicolas Rubio (1928-2024). Perfect condition. Sold with invoice-certificate. Nicolás Rubió was born in 1928 in Barcelona, into a family of the enlightened and republican bourgeoisie. The turn taken by the Spanish Civil War in 1938 forced the Rubió family to leave Spain, abandoning all their possessions, and to take refuge in France, in Cantal, not far from Aurillac, more precisely in the hamlet of Vielle, belonging to the commune of Ytrac. It was in this hamlet, where Nicolás Rubió lived happily from his tenth to his twentieth year, that he learned, in addition to his native Catalan and Spanish, French (school and rural) and popular Occitan with the peasants around him, several of whose figures would continue to populate his memory and inspire him. He also kept an illustrated diary there, in French, in which he recorded the various adventures of his exile in Auvergne. In 1948, the family decided to leave for Argentina, where Nicolás settled permanently. He did not initially think of becoming a painter, and instead wrote stories. It was in particular by noting the state of disinheritance of the fileteado, this decorative art typical of Buenos Aires, then largely abandoned, and by desire to rehabilitate it and to demonstrate its interest to the public, a desire shared with the woman who became his wife, the sculptor Esther Barugel, that he finally came to painting. Together, they would write books devoted to the fileteado, and Rubió, in general, would enjoy doing research on popular and modern art. Partly thanks to their action, the fileteado was able to find new outlets, other than transport vehicles, its traditional medium, so that Buenos Aires currently has (2013) around 250 active fileteadores. From the mid-1970s, he felt nostalgia for the country of his adolescence and regularly returned to France and, more particularly, to Cantal and Vielle2,3. Rubió's art, although related to naive art, does not fit into any movement, the painter not seeking to create a school; on the contrary, he led a withdrawn and solitary life in the company of his wife (who died in 2007). His first subject was Argentina and its inhabitants, their customs and their habits, with a gaze that was at once amused, caustic and affectionate; at the instigation of his wife, he would later pictorially evoke his memories of Vielle, its colorful characters, its little world and its history, which would give rise to some 800 paintings, now dispersed. In 2013, he returned to Cantal to accompany the filming of a film for which an Argentinian filmmaker and documentarian, Fernando Domínguez, had conceived the project in 2011. The film, entitled "75 habitantes, 20 casas, 300 vacas", shows Nicolás Rubió traveling through Auvergne, from Aurillac to Clermont-Ferrand, and busy, in a way, painting a lost paradise. Source Wikipedia