Sergio Purtell is a Chilean/American artist
Episode 207: Sergio Purtell is a Chilean/American artist.
I had the great opportunity to receive Sergio’s recent book Love’s Labour from the good people at Stanley/Barker this past year. I was quite taken with Sergio’s work, having not been familiar with it previously. That is one of the great things about publishers like Stanley/Barker fishing out bodies of work lying dormant in various artist’s archives. It is important that we look backwards as well as forwards for new or unseen work.
Sergio has a ton of great work in his archive that you can visit on his site, and during the conversation, we spoke about a great deal of it and his history coming to America from Chile. That part of the discussion is fascinating. As a young man, Sergio fled to America at the behest of his family when political troubles were at their zenith in his home country. It allowed Sergio to travel and make significant bodies of work in both America and abroad-the majority of which would inform Love’s Labour.
The conversation was somehow poetic. Sergio’s soft demeanor and his background made for illuminating gab. I often think of his pictures and the pictures of his mentor Tod Papageorge-both who share a particular dream-like quality. Sergio’s pictures of European summer’s feel like lost fragments of civilization from another time or place. They engage the viewer in their ethereal boundaries. People look like statues, places like lost ruins of the past. Please dig into this episode. Its long format perfectly fits the aims of Nearest Truth.
