Alberto Greco

Buenos Aires, Argentina 1931 - Barcelona, España 1965

            Alberto Greco's life was brief but intense. A provocative, sharp and overflowing artist, he reflected his uniqueness and passion both in his way of life and in his artistic conception and practice. Born in 1931 in the city of Buenos Aires, after a brief period at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Manuel Belgrano, he began to explore other languages. He was a writer, poet, plastic artist and founder of Il Vivo Dito, a movement that conceived living art as the adventure of the real. In 1962 he papered the city of Genoa with the manifesto that would give birth to this movement, defined as the art of pointing and looking at what happens in the street, without modifying it or turning it into an object to be contemplated in an art gallery. 

            Greco would walk the streets of different cities with a chalk in his hand and with one stroke he would enclose groups of people who passed by and then followed their path, or objects that he found around. Although he knew that those chalk strokes would disappear, he would sign them with his name. Thus, art became a movement that included people, time, conversations, rumors, smells: a living art. Greco was part of a variant of Informalism, a current that manifested itself against rationality in art and incorporated imagery from the unconscious and unconventional materials in the production of works. He worked with coffee, toothpaste, metal sheets, things that appeared here and there. Before using the oils, he left them outdoors to be modified by nature.

            "Always walking in the opposite direction from the one you should go is the only way to get somewhere," emerges as a premise of his life and work. He ended his life at the age of 34, in Barcelona, taking a large dose of barbiturates. At that tragic moment, he left two inscriptions: one on the palm of his left hand that read "End" and another on a wall that completed the meaning of the first one "This is my best work".

            His quest, guided by his interest in communication, was to make his work popular and to put art always at the service of life.