Tony and his Crazy Hats

It was an experience and pleasure to meet Antonio Valiente, alias Tony: a true phenomenon with his trademark; ‘un Sombrero Loco’ (a crazy hat) in ‘el País de las Pulgas’ (the country of fleas)!

The artist was born in 1935 in Córdoba and since 2003 he has been part of the family of vendors of the Mercado de Dorrego or better known as the Mercado de Pulgas (Flea Market) in Colegiales. A jack of all trades; businessman, poet, photographer, philosopher, market vendor; nowadays he can be seen as artist.

“He who wants to call me an artist is allowed to do so, however I think an artist is someone like Michelangelo. I can only call myself an artist here at the Mercado de Pulgas,” Tony explains.

Gazing around his little palace, you are curious at first sight. Of course at a flea market you may expect a lot of weird and crazy objects, but this stall of Tony’s beats everything and not only the market stall…If there was a price for most originally decorated vendor, Tony would easily win: Dressed as if he just stepped out of a children’s movie; wearing a waistcoat completely covered with brooches and badges, a colourful tie and six big flamboyant rings on his hands, and, not to be missed, a crazy hat for the finishing touch.

The hat is fully decorated with all sorts of things: whistles, jewellery, buttons, pins, teaspoons, bells and charms among others. Not surprisingly the hat weighs approximately 3.5kg and therefore presumably causes some headaches. But that’s not a reason to not wear it – as Tony says: “This is my favourite hat which I made 25 years ago. It is the first one I ever made and I wear it everyday!”

If you fancy a similar hats – or, better stated, art sculpture – for your own collection, you should save some money as they cost around US$350. It takes the artist approximately two weeks to make them, excluding the time ahead to collect all of the material used in decoration, and this can be truly everything! Hats decorated with teaspoons, cups and other dinner service pieces, with little lamps, snakes, curlers, lighthouses, race cars, dominos, birds, bottle caps… or hats decorated like a zoo, covered with animals. There really is something for everybody.

Apart from his first hat, the artists other personal favourite is a big frame, with a big cross in the middle, surrounded with at least a hundred different watches and clocks, with all of the hands set to precisely on 8.04. And about the owners of this ‘watch collection’; ex-president Carlos Saúl Menem was one of them, according to Tony. It took the vendor about a year to collect all the watches and other gadgets presented on the frame and another three months to make the work itself. That may explain the declared value of US$12,000.

So, Tony is not just creating hats, his stall is also full of crazy bags, frames, clocks and accessories of all kinds. Most of his work has a name, such as ‘Adriana Dos’, ‘El Cementerio’ or ‘Cómo viene la Mano’.

One of the first things that will cross your mind when you will see Tony’s work is how the idea of his style and the work and such, arose. Tony explained: “I made my first hat – which is the one I am wearing now – 25 years ago, but the idea to seriously do something with it came into my mind after a dream I had on 6th November 2002. In this dream, the man up there – pointing to the sky – in the transformation of Carlos Gardel, was whistling the following into my ears: ‘you know how to do it, so repeat this and make it for the whole world’. So the first day I started at the Mercado de Pulgas, I put my own hat at down at the table and at that moment something happened something with me; a sort of implosion in my inner body. I wasn’t feeling myself, it was as if Gardel was making part of my body and spirit. The dream I had appeared three times again and after that I started making these kind of hats which I will keep doing for as long as I can.”

Following the advice of this ghostly apparition of Carlos Gardel was a path well chosen. Previous clients are big artists and his work can be seen in galleries all over the world and approximately every month he sells one of his ‘darlings’. In general, many of his buyers are from abroad, although Tony himself have never left the country.

“I once sold a hat to a Spanish lady here at the Mercado de Pulgas. Two years later, a guy from Spain showed up here at my market stall, to tell me I was a legend in Spain, since the queen had one of my hats in her house?! So presumably that was the hat I sold two years before to this random Spanish lady, if she was not the queen herself…”

Tony makes all his work by himself behind his stall at the Flea Market. Some of the material for his work he buys from his colleagues at the same market or finds it by himself, however the majority is bought from cartoneros. He showed us several bags full of buttons – separated by colour, old lamps and belt buckles, which he just bought from a cartonero.

Occasionally the vendor makes an exception and complies with a request off someone to create a special desired hat, but mainly the artist makes what he wants. “I like to do what I want and I like to create and make what I want. If I see a certain object through which I get inspiration, I decide to do something with it and in this way a new hat or another work, is born.”

Although the vendor doesn’t consider himself as a ‘real’ artist and asserts he doesn’t have any idea how his work became famous, he certainly acts like a star and everyone knows this. The vendor visibly loves all the attention he gets and is proud of his work, which is certainly not without a reason.

Tony’s hats and his other works can definitely be considered as art; crazy but with a lot of creativity and personality; a perfect reflection of the maker himself.