In 2006, the artist Alberto Aguilar decided to let go of his studio. “I don’t like things that throw off being free,” he says. “And not having a studio is, for me, being very free, to not have to make things in that designated space. To think of any of these spaces as a place to make things.”
Aguilar grew up in Cicero, where his parents owned a small grocery store called La Grande. After school, Aguilar and his siblings (three brothers and one sister) would walk there and hang out in the back. His mother cooked dinner for them in the deli. Then, once his father arrived at the store from his first job, he would take over and his mother would walk them home.
After that he stopped using drugs. He decided to improve his life and started focusing more on school. He enrolled in a photography class and he excelled at it. But what really interested him was a painting class in the next room. “I would always see all the painters go in and out of the room, and I felt kind of envious,” he says. “I felt like I belonged there.”
The painter Clintel Steed, who also attended undergrad with Aguilar, agrees. “He’s always challenged himself,” Steed says. He recalls one time when the school organized a first-come, first-served trip to Italy. “We stayed there all night waiting in line, like it was a concert or something.” On the trip, Steed says, a lot of the other students treated it as a vacation. Not Aguilar. He spent his time visiting museums, seeing the classics, and painting. “He’s always been a serious dude,” Steed says. “It’s just a way of looking at life.” He compares Aguilar’s focus to that of Picasso. “I think that’s what people don’t get, to be Picasso in the studio. He made like three or four paintings a day. If you’re gonna try to somehow stand up to that, then you’ve got to bring it, you know what I’m saying? You can’t be joking around with that. We were all painting hard.”
In the resulting video, Aguilar and his pajama-clad kids move around the room, bouncing the red balloon to one another. The handbells, constantly in motion, sound like wind chimes. Their highly resonant tone adds a pleasant atmospheric effect. In the foreground Aguilar’s other two children, Isabella and Joaquin, play a computer game. Though offscreen, their voices are clearly heard. Just as the balloon falls to the floor and the game ends, Isabella says the phrase “sensitive equipment.”
“Collaborating with Alberto is kind of like looking through a camera obscura,” Shaeffer says. “Everything is flipped upside down and seems foreign, in a delightful and illuminating way. You never know what’s coming next or what’s going to happen. Working with him makes me feel alive, in all ways.”
