Roger Mantegani: an intimate, theatrical, urban stroke

He always knew it. Roger Mantegani clearly remembers his vacation trips on the Tren Rayo (the Sunbeam Train) from his native Córdoba to Buenos Aires, and his visits to museums in the city, where he was dazzled by the paintings he saw. For this reason, he also recalls, with precision, the day, as a teenager, he stood up to his parents—his father, a postal worker, and his mother, a housewife—and said: "I just want to draw." A 68-year-old from Córdoba, he has more than fulfilled that wish: he has dedicated his life to art —he held his first exhibition at 16—and has just opened the Philosophy of Hope exhibition at the Duhau Palace's Paseo de las Artes . The exhibition brings together 26 works from different series, produced between 2019 and 2025, all large-format.

Although his biography indicates that he is a figurative artist, this style is not precisely what is displayed in the charming gallery of the Recoleta hotel—open to the public 24/7, to make matters even more appealing. This gallery exhibits works using mixed media—charcoal, oil, pastel, collage, dripping—that depict "street figures," as the artist himself defines them.

There are faces, torsos, bodies leaning or standing, in motion or still, emerging from the background like visions. The occasional dog is glimpsed. There are no names or stories. Mantegani says he's inspired every time he goes for a walk through the Palermo Woods with his dog Isidoro, a border collie he inherited. With his cell phone, he captures images like notes, a quick, inexact record, as if to get a glimpse of what's to come. Or rather, of what won't come: he's worked with live models for so long that now what he wants is to break away from figuration, from molds, from prolixity. To do, so to speak, whatever he wants. That is, to draw with his fingers, with dusters, with rags. And the work, seen up close, seems amorphous, but the forms are there, suggested not in the foreground, but from afar.

“At times, the work becomes almost abstract; the figures blur, but they never disappear,” notes Mantegani, who at this stage of his life and production has abandoned the colorful palette to turn to a more austere one, more black and white. The series presented reflect this evolution: Black and White, Introspections II, Paper City , and Balance of Chaos . “If before his compositions evoked the astonishing precision of a 17th-century Dutch painting, now the restlessness of Goya's black paintings dominates,” notes Julio Sánchez Baroni , historian, art critic, and contributor to Revista Ñ , in the curatorial text that accompanies the exhibition.

There is something performative , if you will, in the way this artist intervenes in the support: the figures are captured on fabrics, on recovered urban posters or on wood or stage paper – because the theatre has always been part of his history, which is why his works propose a journey between the theatrical and the intimate, between the imaginary and the real.

Mantegani defines himself as self-taught, although he studied at the Figueroa Alcorta School of Fine Arts in Córdoba and trained in Paris with the Argentine painter and sculptor Lucio Loubet. During the 1980s, he lived and worked in the French capital, where, in addition to his training with Loubet, he participated in group exhibitions and began to develop a freer, less academic perspective.

Upon his return to Argentina, he continued his production in Córdoba and later in Buenos Aires, combining his artistic work with theatrical stagecraft, especially on the independent circuit. This transition between academic training and his own path left visible marks: there is rigor, but also freedom. There is a memory of the craft, but also a desire to break away from it.

Mantegani has exhibited in contemporary art spaces in Córdoba, Buenos Aires, Mexico, the United States, and Spain. His works are part of private collections in Argentina, France, and Spain. He has always maintained a low profile throughout his career, never straying from manual work: he paints, draws, assembles, and writes handwritten notes on the backs of many of his pieces.

Sánchez Baroni says of the exhibition: “In all this maelstrom of dark forms, there is something that ignites a signal in souls, a philosophy of hope and love for the most forgotten, for the helpless, and for the animals that wander in a world awaiting redemption.”

* Roger Mantegani's Philosophy of Hope can be seen at the Paseo de las Artes in the Duhau Palace, Alvear Avenue 1661, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.