Carlos Páez Vilaró

In life, art, and love Carlos Paez Vilaro was passionate. His first marriage in 1955 to Madelon Rodriguez Gomez, who bore him three children, lasted 6 years. Of these, his son "Carlitos" Paez Rodriguez, became a college rugby team player and was nearly killed in a plane crash carrying the team. Missing for 72 days, he was finally found alive and rescued.

He met a married woman, Annette Deussen in 1976 and became her paramour, which led to complications. She gave birth to his child in 1984, finally obtaining a divorce from her husband in 1986.

He died on 24 February 2014, at the 90, at his beloved and whimsical home, Casapueblo, in Punta Ballena, Uruguay.

Born on November 1, 1923 in Montevideo, Uruguay, Carlos Paez Vilaro lived a very modest life as a child born in a financially struggling family. He began his artistic passion with drawing, at a very young age.

He moved to Argentina in 1939 and became a printing apprentice. Greatly struck by the contrast between the ordinariness of factory life and the vigor and vitality of the Tango districts of Buenos Aires, he created his early paintings exhibiting those perceptions.

Approximately 10 years later, in the 1940s, he returned to Uruguay and began to delve in the bright, bold colors of Afro-Uruguayan arts and culture.

During the years from 1939 to the late 1940s in Buenos Aires he explored art through drawings and spent the years absorbing cultural experiences. He then returned to Uruguay to throw himself into Candombe dance and music, living in Mediomundo, enthralled by the black heritage of Uruguay.

In 1958, Carlos Paez Vilaro joined an artists' movement known as ‘Grupo de los 8’, which aimed at introducing new techniques in painting. It was then that he bought the property in Punta Ballena, by the sea, that was to become the famous ‘Casapueblo’ years later, designed and constructed by him in his unique vision.

He traveled extensively to Brazil, Africa, and Europe, always returning to his beloved Uruguay and his passion for Afro-Uruguayan themes in art and music. Markets, funerals, festivals, sandpipers, snippets of ordinary life and extraordinary happenings found their way on to his canvas, and his richly colored, vivid murals graced places as far away as Washington D.C.

Undoubtedly, one of Vilaro's masterpiece achievements is ‘Casapueblo’, built gradually over time, expanding in size, form and grandeur. A flash of dazzling white built by the deep azure sea, this unusual and mysterious building was his home and workshop, and later a hotel. This was his "living sculpture" inspired in design by the regional ‘hornero’ birds' nests. It now draws tourists who are mesmerized by its enchanting form and organic art.

San Isidro Chapel in Buenos Aires, designed by him, integrates the elements of nature into the structure. Using all his experience and observations, he designed a pure white chapel reflecting the serene surroundings and vitality of nature.

In 1959, he crafted the famous mural ‘Roots of Peace’, measuring 155 meters in length and 2 meters in height in the tunnel of the Pan Union American Building which housed the ‘Organization of American States’ in Washington DC.