In August 2020, Milo Lockett I was pissed off The pandemic had been destroying him economically, he continued to pay rent and salaries but he could not work. He saw that what he had achieved in twenty years was slipping from his hands. With that internal color palette, dark and opaque, one night she got on his motorcycle to go buy a soda a few blocks from his house. The lighting was bad, he thought he saw a car coming towards him and he jumped into the ditch. He ended up on the floor, all broken. He had ten missing teeth, a shattered lip, eleven cracked ribs and two broken ones, bruises on his arms, a scraped back, but his hands were intact. The car was not, had never existed. And he started laughing. “It changed my mood and my head, because I realized that it can always be worse. I got it at the time,” she recalls.
A la Ave Fénix, the guy who became an artist almost by chance in 2001, after going bankrupt as a textile entrepreneur; instead of getting angry or desperate, he changed the chip and fulfilled the rest with calm and patience. “If you don’t handle emotions, he can’t handle anything. Precisely in crises, what you have to handle the most is the emotional. And we were in a very strong crisis. The first year of the pandemic, we lost everything. I had to close the Palermo store and decided to come to this one in Tigre, around the corner from my house. A few months ago a lot of work appeared and now we can’t cope, but because there are ten people in the team, we are four, five with my wife, who joined, ”he says. He says that this is an unviable country, that everything is difficult and hampered; but that he decides to stay and bet that one day he will change. “There is a lot of problem with logistics. So the person who bought you a painting and is in Santiago del Estero wants it to arrive before Christmas, not in January, but nothing works here. And I live the same anxiety of whom he is waiting for ”.
News: Rates Argentina as unfeasible. What is the formula to be able to live from art in this country for 20 years?
Milo Lockett: Previous years were more predictable. The field of art was changing. Note that 8 years ago, 5% of our business was on demand, today it is 85 or 90%.
News: But is that something that happens to you or a change within the field?
Lockett: It is a change that I suffered, in the last two years, this thing that people are encouraged to ask you to do for the family and that the dog and the cat are there has been growing.
News: I reformulate the question, what was your recipe to achieve that closeness and break down the barrier of the artist in your atelier?
Lockett: Until 2008/2009, I thought that what legitimized you in art were your prizes. And when I won the Rosa Galisteo National Painting Prize, in Santa Fe, my mind changed because the next day nothing happened, being number one did not generate any change. In 2011, I won a national award again, the one from Luján, and the same thing happened to me and I said: “I’m not going to apply for an award anymore because I don’t need that”. I understood that it was all the same because there was nowhere to go.
News: Testing that system as a very good student.
Lockett: Of course, the prizes are a good pampering and recognition, there are artists who need that because their ego requires it, but…
News: What does yours require? Because he also has an ego, right?
Lockett: It never ceases to amaze me that they recognize me., I go to the supermarket or for coffee and they recognize me, and I’m not a football player, I’m not a cute actor, I’m not a cool guy, I’m more like an Irish gnome, and I’m fascinated when people come up to me and say if you can take a photo. I don’t live for that anyway.
News: After the economic crisis, how are you doing now compared to three years ago?
Lockett: I feel like I’m very current, very energetic, very alive.
News: It was the spoiled child of the art system and for years it has been the brand’s favourite. What would happen to him if he is not chosen more or if he is not chosen as much?
Lockett: I have no complex with that because I am a person who seeks, I come from very low. I tell my children that to drink Coca Cola, one has to be prepared to drink water. Because today you have and tomorrow you may not have, it seems to me that the system is like that. I am ready, I am a person who works in crisis and in comfort. I don’t like comfort so much because comfort doesn’t generate creativity.
News: He was talking about the danger of being driven by emotions. Can the character do it too?
Lockett: Yes, I have had peaks of exposure, in which, obviously, I missed. But that’s why I’m a normal person, otherwise I would be abnormal and live in the character. I am Milo Lockett, a type of flesh and blood, that people recognize, but I don’t let that grow more than it has to grow, because if it doesn’t get over you.
News: How in the system are you today?
Lockett: I always want to be out of the system and the system puts me in., grabs my shirt and puts me inside (laughs). I want to go out every day, I’m always on the edge, I really like the periphery, more than the center. But it seems to me that normality is that we all pay taxes, respect the rules, that each one does his job from the place that he is assigned.
News: Let there be “frames to frame the work.”
Lockett: Clear, because if not everything is anarchy and I don’t know any country that lives in permanent anarchy and has done well, there are systems for a reason.
News: What is art?
Lockett: I’m going to answer you with a response from Picasso: “If I knew, I wouldn’t tell you” (laughs). It seems to me that with art one has to be encouraged because it is a universal right.
News: Is that a workhorse of yours: democratizing the artistic experience?
Lockett: Yes, and that is what is happening in the universal language. We may have geographical differences and logistics problems but art is much more democratic than 10 years ago.
