Visiting lecturer
Intuitive Projects
Guest performers mmmmm collective, Luna Montenegro and Adrian Fisher
Slade School of Fine Arts, UCL, London
December 2016
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A talk exploring the work the Chilean-born, painter, poet, playboy and boxer, Álvaro Guevara Reimers (1894-1951).
‘Álvaro Guevara moved to London in 1912 and won a scholarship to study at the Slade School of Fine Art. Having established himself as an artist, he was associated with the Bloomsbury circle. Eventually, despite his ambiguous sexual orientation, he married the painter Meraud Guinness, an inquisitive adventuress that was the elder daughter of multimillionaire banker Benjamin Guinness, part of the Guinness brewery clan. Guevara lived between Valparaiso, London, Paris and Aix-En-Provence. Most of his paintings were exhibited with some acclaim in the 1920s and 1930s. However, the majority of his body of work had been reduced to ashes when a bomb fell on December 9th, 1940 on the warehouses of James Bourlet & Sons, where Alvaro had arranged for it to be stored during the war. Three of Guevara’s surviving paintings are held in the Tate Gallery collection. Despite their tumultuously bohemian conjugal – yet mostly separated – life, when Álvaro became terminally ill with cancer, Meraud cared for him in her property ‘La Tour de Cesar’, near Aix-en-Provence, until he died in October 1951. In his last year of life he was composing a collection of prose poems in French. Guinness published it posthumously, in 1954, as a small edition of 400 copies, titled ‘Dictionnaire Intituif’. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wanted to translate the text into Spanish but died before this could happen’. (Extract from piece written by Federica Chiocchetti (The Photocaptionist) and published on Unseen Magazine, Amsterdam, 2015)
Intuitive Project is a platform directed by Ignacio Acosta devoted to exploring the work of Álvaro Guevara. The project proposes a fictional encounter with Guevara through an imaginary archive. Facts and fiction are intertwined through the fusion of original archival materials with constructed re-interpretations and the idea of re-enacting his life and personality.