The Crowd (No. 3)

Antonio Seguí's maze-like paintings such as The Crowd (No. 3) of 1991 are part of the series of works about the crowd, or la multitud. Largely an artistic production since the mid 1980s when he first employed the figure of the dapper little man in his compositions of nocturnal scenes, Seguí's exploration of the self and post-modern man's place in society, have become an obsessive exercise in abstraction. Not quite abandoning the figurative, Seguí inserts the human figure (most often a man in a tailored suit) that stands as an Everyman into compositions that are impossibly patterned with the repetition of this leitmotif. The artist's ordered labyrinths annihilate the sense of place and instead offer multiple perspectives--a city scene in any contemporary metropolis--tumultuous, frenzied and always on the move. Up close, the little man is meant to be part of a crowd; he is himself but lost.

Seguí was born in Córdoba in 1934 and studied in Argentina, France and Spain from 1951 to 1955. In 1957, the artist had his first one-man show; by 1958, Seguí had left for Mexico where he began to experiment with new techniques and the graphic arts. In 1963, the artist left for Paris and has been based there ever since. Not quite an abstract artist, Seguí has worked within the language of Pop ever since maturing as an artist. The artist has often used collage with cut papers or pieces of fabric, neatly cut to fit the figures that populate his canvases. His "little men" figures seem copies of one another--he insists on replication to emphasize the nature of our urban narratives--the cadence of the hustle and bustle and the culture of the masses.