Andrés Waissman — Painter of Multitudes.

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Waissman (2010) is a Heritage Film Project documentary directed by Montes-Bradley and shot on location at the painter's studio in Palermo, Buenos Aires. The film offers a sustained portrait of Andrés Waissman — an Argentine artist whose Multitudes series has placed him among the most distinctive contemporary voices in Latin American art.

Beginnings

Waissman grew up in a middle-class home in a middle-class Buenos Aires neighborhood, in a family that placed culture — music, literature, the visual arts — at the center of daily life. He was eleven when his parents enrolled him in his first studio. At fourteen, they built him a small room on the terrace of the family home. That rooftop space, he recalls, was his first atelier.

By 1966 he had concluded he could not stop painting. The word professional has always made him uncomfortable; it sounds factory-like to his ear. He prefers the simpler claim: a visual artist.

The Multitudes — and the history behind them

Waissman's signature series, the Multitudes, did not arrive fully formed. It emerged at the end of the 1970s, layered on top of an earlier body of work he calls Mutilados, begun in 1973 — three years before Argentina's military dictatorship plunged the country into its darkest chapter.

The Multitudes are not abstract crowds. They are people on ships, lines of figures crossing the canvas in a slow horizontal drift. To understand them, the film traces Waissman's own ancestry: a paternal grandfather who arrived in Argentina from Romania in 1900 aboard one of the great immigration ships; an Ashkenazi father born in Buenos Aires; a Sephardic mother from Syria; a grandmother born in Manchester, England, where Syrian and Turkish families once traveled in search of brides; older relatives further back in Italy.

What the artist calls nomadism is what drives the Multitudes. The figures crossing his canvases are not only a memory of the Jewish migrations or the great immigrant ships that built Argentina — they are also contemporary, he insists: people moving from the north of the country toward the suburbs of the big city, anonymous crowds searching for a place. The Multitudes, in his words, are about borders, ruins, and people trying to find their place.

San Francisco, the 1980s, and the Peronist family in California

Waissman married in Argentina in 1982. Soon after, he and his wife, the gallerist Gachi Prieto, moved to the United States. In San Francisco he met the painter Mark McLoud, who introduced him to Imago Gallery — a relationship that lasted nearly five years and pulled his work into the orbit of American Neo-Expressionism. The film captures what happened next: a theatrical series called Playroom, populated by figures with diabolic pets lurking behind them.

The detail the artist returns to is that — even though the canvases were painted in California — the families in them looked unmistakably Argentine. Peronist, even. The country he had left continued to assert itself in the work. Waissman returned to Buenos Aires in 1991, opened a large studio, and began teaching.

Hebrew letters, steel wool, and mythological animals

The most intimate sequences of the film are filmed at the easel. The camera observes Waissman building a canvas the way a conservator might restore a manuscript: a base of dark cadmium red, then countless small layers of script-like marks made with a fine brush. The marks are inspired by the shape of Hebrew letters and by Waissman's long-standing interest in the Kabbalah — though he is careful to clarify that he is not a Kabbalist himself.

The point, he explains, is not legibility. The viewer is meant to feel the impact of a secret page from a secret book — a fragment from the first two thousand years of recorded time whose meaning the painter himself does not claim to know. Asked by Montes-Bradley what would happen if someone were to decipher it, Waissman answers that it would not matter. The language, he says, belongs to people no longer remembered.

Around the time of the filming, he had begun working with an unexpected new material: steel wool. The medium allowed him to build three-dimensional crowds and the recurring mythological animals that mutate, oxidize, and turn gold-brown over time — a material echo of the social decay that runs through much of his subject matter.

Two artists, one documentary

One of the most disarming moments in the film comes when Waissman looks directly at the camera and asks the filmmaker:

You are an artist like me. What are we going to do with this film?

The line lands as both joke and manifesto. Waissman is not an art-historical lecture. It is one artist observing another at work, and inviting the viewer into that intimacy. The approach has since become a Heritage Film Project signature: portraits that privilege the studio, the kitchen table, and the neighborhood restaurant — in this case Pedro's, two blocks from Waissman's home, where the artist eats steak and homemade ravioli with friends — over the museum wall text.

[Photo: Andrés Waissman and Eduardo Montes-Bradley at the easel]

A lasting portrait

Sixteen years after its premiere, Waissman remains one of the defining early documents in Heritage Film Project's catalogue of Latin American artists. The questions raised on camera — about migration, displacement, anonymity, and the silence of an undeciphered page — have only grown more relevant with time. Waissman was already painting them, in steel wool and Hebrew-shaped script, when the cameras arrived in Palermo.

This film was produced by Heritage Film Project with the support of the Documentary Film Fund, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. If this story resonates with you, please share it, leave a comment, and subscribe for updates on new and forthcoming portraits.