Sadness. 1943.

Oil on wood. Measurements: 90 x 70 cm. Signed and dated in the lower right corner. In excellent condition, and with a magnificent frame.

Aquino was a master in the art of capturing the moment, the soul of the landscape. Let us observe here a cloudy spring morning or afternoon, after a few days of rain, on a plain between the mountains of Córdoba. We identify spring in the light green that appears in the trees, on rainy days, in the intense green of the bushes on the ground. Aquino titled this oil painting Sadness, and certainly the atmosphere that it transmits to us is intimate, taciturn, melancholic. In order to quickly capture that subtle quintessence of the landscape, he painted his works in a single day, and with a palette knife.

José León Pagano helped Luis Aquino display his talent not only in science - he was a biologist, head of practical work at the Physiology Institute of the Buenos Aires School of Medicine, directed by the Nobel Prize winner Bernardo A. Houssay, whose close collaborator- but also in his deepest passion, that of painting. Well, if the advice and example of Pagano himself helped him, who at the time was a writer, painter, poet, comedy writer, university professor, historian and art critic. Pagano wrote about Aquino: “We see here the emotional painter, the man identified with nature, with the poetry of nature (...) Aquino conceives the landscape according to the rules of plein air. Seeing things organizing themselves in the light, modified by it and valued by it, was the mission accomplished by those who made the atmosphere the main subject of the painting. (...) He is pleased to individualize the moment into a defining effect. All his will is concentrated on grasping precisely that. The coloring matter goes through all the extremes. It blazes in bright sun-kissed hues or subsides in shades of hazy grays.” (1) At the time he moved to the mountains of Córdoba, where he met who would be his friend and mentor: Fernando Fader.

Luis Isabelino Aquino (Buenos Aires, 1895 - 1968) was a self-taught painter belonging to the Impressionist movement. He also excelled in sculpture, especially in medals. He was in charge of the direction of the Isaac Fernández Blanco Municipal Museum of Hispano-American Art and in 1947 he received the Municipal Salon Award.

Note:

1. José León Pagano, The art of the Argentines, Buenos Aires, author's edition, 1937.