Some facts and pieces of the puzzle of a life, year by year up to the present
2020
In March the editing of The Year of Living Locked Up began, finally premiered on July 11. This is an experimental feature film (104 minutes) presented as “the first tubefilm in history”, made entirely from found footage film under public domain that has been reframed, colorized, and altered with multiple visual effects and editing techniques. During the solitary process of assembling and distorting archival material, several short films emerged that can be viewed independently as small experiments (clicking on the following titles will take you to YouTube): Explanation of a Nightmare, La advertencia, A Little Poem With Your Name, Love Is a Vampire… But the primal work is The Year of Living Locked Up, a satire about an imaginary country that can be viewed for free (original in broken English) by clicking here or in the poster image.
The Craters
film still from The Year of Living Locked Up (Gustavo Charif, 2020)
As a curiosity, the film’s trailer is inspired by the original 1968 trailer for Rosemary’s Baby. Regard the plot… Everything takes place in Leche De Brea. A country where nobody knows nobody and everything is what it seems. When a new global virus called “garland” appears, President Romeo Betto (a.k.a. the “Dolce Duce”) imposes an innovative treatment, the “yeartine”, consisting in locking up the whole population all over a year while releasing the most notorious criminals and thieves. Meanwhile, to make matters worse, the scriptwriter and director of this film seems to have lost his mind.
The Year of Living Locked Up in IMDb: imdb.com/title/tt12867248. Full data sheet here.
2020-2024
Detail of the self-portrait “by” Capillo Tulumba Yago ¡Soy la parte más negra de un meteorito!
(I am the blackest part of a meteorite!, ink on paper, 2024)
Even before the publication of the short stories book Narraciones simples (2018) and after living in Taipei (2016-2017), he remained largely withdrawn from public life for about seven years. He hardly painted at all, and his work was mostly limited to editing his films alone and writing. Nevertheless, in 2021 he began experimenting with a new series of paintings, initially on small or medium-sized canvases, which he encompassed under the umbrella of what he called “human painting,” an aesthetic affirmation of the human species. In 2022 he painted practically only one canvas, slightly larger and in the same vein, titled El pueblo no quiere saber de qué se trata (The people don’t want to know what is going on!). NOTE: The title inverts a memorable phrase from Argentine history, “¡el pueblo quiere saber de qué se trata!”, people want to know what is going on!, an anonymous sentence used during the May Revolution, that began the Argentine War of Independence on 1810. In 2023 he did not paint any canvases, and in 2024 the series was completed with the triptych El sistema de la caja negra (The Black Box System), exhibited in the same year at the Contraviento Cultural Center (Rosario).
El pueblo no quiere saber de qué se trata (The people don’t want to know what is going on, 2022) – oil, collage, pencil and inks on canvas – 80 x 120 cm
He gradually returned to public life starting in August 2024, when he held the solo exhibition Lo negro (The Black), invited by the Contraviento Cultural Center (Rosario). The theme of the exhibition was also proposed by the directors of the space, so Charif invents a fictitious artist, the Afro-Spanish draftsman and engraver Capillo Tulumba Yago (born in 1866 in a small town in Asturias, although of African roots, and disappeared in China on an uncertain date), from whom he “rescues” 22 ink drawings on paper. The Black becomes a multidisciplinary exhibition-work, composed of 22 drawings by Tulumba Yago that illustrate blackness in different cultures and mythologies, a biography-study about the apocryphal artist printed on a large wall of the room and titled The Black Drawings of Tulumba Yago, an essay printed on the opposite wall titled Blackness in its Deepest Blackness, an oil painting (The Black Exhibition), large triptych made with Charif’s classic technique of mixing oil and collage (The Black Box System), and the projection of an experimental film (The Black Planet), all of which is complemented by a brief imaginary dialogue between Tulumba and Charif printed on the cards given to visitors. In other words, the exhibition turns out to be an installation that includes essay, literary fiction, conceptual art, video, drawing and painting; which is why, as with the Ailanthus installation carried out in Taiwan in 2016, The Black deserves its own section in the ART section. There you can see all the works and texts that made up the exhibition (shortcut here).
2025
Coat of arms of Tar Milk, the imaginary country in The Year of Living Locked Up · Charif 2020
He has finished two of the five novels in the pentalogy he has been working on for decades. One of these novels is based on and structured by the experimental film The Year of Living Locked Up, which he made five years earlier.
During these years in which his pictorial production has been less, he privately carries out restoration work, even restoring works by, among other artists, Diego Quispe Tito (1611-1681), Salvator Rosa (1615-1673), Anselm Feuerbach (1829-1880), Gabriel Roucena (19th century), Fray Guillermo Butler (1880-1961), Orlando Pierri (1913-1992), Ricardo Carpani (1930-1997), Rómulo Macció (1931-2016) or Rogelio Polesello (1939-2014).
Participates in the collective exhibition Contemporary Art in Buenos Aires at Zamora Arte (June/August), along with Willy Espíndola, Mushu, Valeria Pérez Fuchs, Pedro Roth and Carlos Tessarolo among others.
2026
At the end of July 2026, Caburé Publishers released Los rayos invisibles (The Invisible Rays). More information can be found in the LITERATURE section of this website.
He is currently preparing a feature film as director, continues working on several books, translating literature from Chinese and other languages, and working on the screenplay for a feature film based on a proposal made to him years ago by the legendary Swiss artist and musician Dieter Meier. He has just finished a forthcoming volume of poetry.
Charif · 沙里夫 · 