Uruguayan artist; son among survivors in ‘Alive’ plane crash
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay — Carlos Paez Vilaro, a selftrained painter, sculptor, screenwriter, musician and architect who championed Afro-Uruguayan Candombe music and dance, created colorful murals in dozens of cities around the world, and built a huge “living sculpture” that became an iconic 50-room hotel, died Monday. He was 90.
Mr. Paez Vilaro’s son, known as “Carlitos,” said the prolific artist died at home in “Casapueblo,” the sprawling four-star hotel outside Punta del Este that included his workshop and a museum.
Mr. Paez Vilaro worked until his dying day, and “was lucid, impeccable, a model for everyone,” the son told Uruguay’s Channel 12.
Only nine days earlier, the artist banged his drums and marched with his beloved “Llamadas” group, the most traditional of Uruguay’s carnival culture, in which Afro-Uruguayans and whites wearing blackface dance to the rhythms of Candombe, a music brought by slaves from Africa.
Mr. Paez Vilaro, who was white, was born in Montevideo on Nov. 1, 1923. As a young man, he immersed himself in the culture of black Uruguayans, whose traditions would inspire much of his life’s work. Candombe was socially unacceptable in the 1940s, and is celebrated in Uruguay now thanks in no small measure to Mr. Paez Vilaro’s art and advocacy.
One of Mr. Paez Vilaro’s most difficult times came in the winter of 1972, when a plane carrying his son Carlitos and other members of his Uruguayan rugby team crashed high in the Chilean Andes. Authorities eventually abandoned the search, but Mr. Paez Vilaro never gave his son up for dead. Finally, after 72 days, the painter’s son was found among the 16 survivors whose ordeal was retold in the movie “Alive.”