Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, on November 4, 1960, Alvaro Ardao shows his ability and vocation for painting and drawing from an early age, so his teachers encourage him to cultivate such forms of art.
At high school he meets the exceptional artist Maria Freire, who encourages the group to experiment the abstraction of shape and colour.
In 1979 he starts his studies at the University of the Republic which he later abandons to devote himself to study art at Círculo de Bellas Artes, the oldest and most important institution in the country (1906).
The great teacher and artist Hector Sgarbi, former disciple of André Lhote in Paris and former friend of Chaim Soutine and Georges Rouault, gives him a deep and universal education. He studies the different aesthetic traditions and their methods, as well as the written legacies of the Masters of the past, like Leonardo's "Treatise on painting", Rodin's "Art", Lhote's "Treatise on landscape", Matisse's "Reflections about art", among others.
He finishes his studies at Círculo de Bellas Artes with a "Distinction" qualification.
In 1985 he meets master Jorge Damiani, at the same time he develops his first stage of oneiric and psychological nature, and due to the characteristics of his work, he was then considered "a promise of high artistic value" by the national press ("El Día" 10/10/87).
He awakens to the philosophy and art of millenary China. He reads translations of various artists and poets like Shu-da, Mi-fei, Shih-tao, Su-tung'po or the ineffable Wang-wei, enabling him to understand his poetic and artistic path.
His inquiring spirit, one with an open tendency to universality and which would not refuse any tendency, would spontaneously lead him to different stylistic tendencies: no-law, absolute spontaneity.
It is worth mentioning that in the museums of New York he learns about the aesthetic models of the great European masters of the XX century; an already ancient modernity that he tries to rescue, for he considers it global, universal, the meeting point of all cultures and the foundation of the psychological process of all inventiveness, which is the opposite to Latin American art today.
Speaking about his exhibitions, it is worth mentioning the important retrospective shown in February 2006 in Museo San Fernando de Maldonado, which sums up the last 30 years of the artist's work.
People nowadays forget they have their own personality. "I am not the others", said Dogen Zenji in the XIII century. Any true and authentic painting comes from mental understanding.
At the present moment, Ardao lives and has his atelier in the Uruguayan seaside resort of Punta del Este.

2004; austral winter