Despite having shown his work in galleries around the world and sold paintings to giants like Donald Trump and the Clinton Foundation, Julio Chaile is curious. Graceful in appearance and demeanour, the 45-year-old Argentine artist views the world with a childlike sense of wonder. While asking a question, he tilts his head to the side as if attempting to peer inside your brain and examine your soul.
We meet in his meticulously curated Constitución flat, where we are surrounded by paintings from three distinct phases of his career: the abstract expressionism of his London period, the bold pop art from his time in New York City and the photographic realism of his recent work in Buenos Aires.
Although I am the one clutching a notebook and tape recorder, Julio perches in the pilot’s seat throughout the two-hour interview, our conversation loop-de-looping to the rhythm of his inquisitive mind.
Raised in Buenos Aires, Julio attended English schools before earning a degree in architecture. “In the Renaissance everybody was an architect, like Leonardo, Michelangelo and Rafael,” he explains matter-of-factly. “So it’s very classic.”
At 25, Julio moved to London in search of gainful employment. Once he had compiled enough rejection letters to paper a wall, he was finally hired by the prominent Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid “to do some drawings”. The experience was a frustrating one: “She was famous and she was crazy, and nobody told me what to do.”
Living in a squat and doing odd jobs to get by, Julio began experimenting with art. He and a friend began silently acting out images from their dreams, performing them in London theatres. “In one number she was hanging up from a harness… and I was ironing some clothes – or I was doing a milkshake – I can’t remember. But I was dressed up and she was dressed up as well, and we had white powder on our faces.”
It was also in London that Julio rediscovered his love for painting – a talent that had been remarked upon by his high school art teacher, but that he had never truly developed. And what of his muses? “My first portraits were of tramps and beggars on the streets,” he laughs.
In his late twenties, he had his first exhibition, showing a collection of expressionist figures entitled ‘Abstract Portraits’ at the Durini gallery in London.
In 1993, his art dealer gave him a “scholarship” which entitled him to a room and studio among the lakes and sheep of Wales with only one small catch: he would have to teach art to schoolchildren once a week. “I got too emotionally attached, it’s a problem,” frowns Julio. “You should be colder with children.”
Soon after this flirtation with a bucolic existence, Julio’s time in London reached what he refers to as its “peak”. “I had too many stories in London… you know each city has a peak and then you have to leave.”
After seven years in London he had fallen in and out of love and was ready to move on. As a farewell to the city he wrote, directed and performed in a short musical film entitled ‘London’ (accessible on YouTube), which goes something like this: “Landscapes surround me / Nightlights corrupt me. / Can I touch you, London? / Do you love me, London?”
Not yet ready to return to his native Argentina, Julio spent a year indulging his senses in Paris. “I never painted in Paris, because Paris is all about pleasures. Food, wine, museums… a painter is not like a musician. If you’re a musician you have to play every day… if you’re a painter you’re always observing.”
He crossed the channel with only a suitcase and a brown leather coat, and settled in the Marais next to a sensitive Finnish blonde and a gay Japanese girl who was a fan of Sumo wrestling. “When I moved to the Marais it was Jewish but it wasn’t that gay. When I left it was very gay,” he remembers.
When his year in Paris was up, Julio briefly returned to San Telmo with a fresh perspective on his native country.
“In Argentina, [people] play the sexes… women pretend to be women and men pretend to be men.” I ask him what it’s like to be gay in such a society, and he smiles. “Well, I left. I ran away.
“I don’t play the roles. I am what I am. In Europe I have more straight friends. Here it’s difficult, because straight men are always talking about football and women, and it’s too much!” he says, his expression caught between solemn and facetious.
When Julio asked a Haitian tarot card reader where to go next, she sent him to New York. There, he found himself overwhelmed by the US media. “I realised that everybody is interested in being famous, everybody wants to be a celebrity, and it’s all about money. So I started painting famous people because I didn’t know anybody in New York. I wanted to make sense of what I saw in the media.”
By pouring blobs of richly colourful enamel onto large canvases, Julio created striking pop art renderings of famous faces like Al Gore, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart (“before the scandal”) and Donald Trump. The latter turned up to Julio’s show at the Argentine embassy and bought his likeness on the spot. “He came with his model wife and two security guards, and he bought the painting. That was the first painting I sold in New York!”
When the twin towers fell on September 11, 2001, Julio watched from the roof of his friend’s Soho studio. After that day, he could no longer concentrate in New York; his time in the city had reached its peak.
“As an artist, the city influences you 100%,” he tells me. “New York is all about money money money, and it doesn’t matter if you’re a prostitute or Donald Trump, it doesn’t matter how you make the money, whereas Argentina is more snob on that level… Now that I’m here in Buenos Aires I think, ‘Why did I paint so many famous people? What was the point?’ But at the time… you’re influenced by the city, and what the city’s about.”
When he turned 40, Julio decided he was ready to return to his patria. In Buenos Aires, his work has continued to change shape. First he painted photo-realistic portraits of members of the Argentine art elite such as Eduardo Constantini, the owner of Malba, whom he secretly hired a photographer to capture at the museum. “He never knew it was me, he never knew I did a portrait of him,” he says mischievously.
I ask Julio how deeply he thinks about a subject while painting. “Picasso said that every person you paint, you sleep with,” he replies, his characteristic earnestness giving way to a sly grin.
“But then I discovered something – and this is interesting – that, when I did these photo-realistic paintings of people, it was like putting a mirror in front of them and they would run away,” he shakes his head. “And I was painting them better than in reality! But they didn’t like to see the reality, and I’m never going to do that again. I prefer to distort them.”
Right now, Julio is painting nudes and myths, as well as re-working some of his paintings from London, whose muted, grayish purple tones reflect the city’s subdued light. I ask him what the future holds.
“I’m interested in painting – not the human soul, but more the existence, or…” he trails off. “Do you understand?” Given the artist’s inquisitive approach to the world and its inhabitants, it’s easy to understand. “I don’t think I’ve reached my peak,” he adds. “I hope I reach it one day…”
What will he do when that day comes?
“You mean will I commit suicide? Or travel around the world? Or become a preacher and convert people? No. What shall I do? I shall continue doing the same.”
