Honoring
Sameer Makarius (1924-2009) by
Julio Sánchez
Only when Alexander the Great reached India did the local sculptors
begin to make statues of the Buddha in human shape. What had
they done until then? They had simply sculpted the wheel of Dharma,
an eight-spoke wheel, the symbol of the teachings imparted by
Siddharta Gautama, called the Buddha, since he had attained Enlightenment.
Each spoke recalled one of the eight paths leading to the end
of human suffering: once Buddha set in motion the wheel of his
teachings, nothing would stop it any longer. Buddha was also
represented by an empty throne, as a reminder that Prince Siddharta
had renounced all pomp in this world. Another way to allude to
him was through his footprints (buddhapada), for it
was considered that what he had bequeathed to us, the teachings
(Dharma) he had left, were far more important than his
human figure. Those Indian sculptors did not represent a body
(one more in the chain of deaths and rebirths); rather, they
represented that substantial something that the Buddha had left
in the course of his passage on Earth.
Sameer Makarius left this Earth very recently, on August 3 of
the current year, soon after the departure of his wife and muse,
Eva, who had passed away on April 27, and with whom he had shared
his life for sixty years. Makarius’s legacy was huge. It
included not only paintings, sketches, drawings, and a significant
photographic archive. He had been born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1924;
he had his academic training in Germany and Hungary, and he arrived
in Argentina in 1953, just before his thirtieth birthday. With
his rich background in the field of abstract, geometric and constructive
art, he soon joined the avant-garde groups of the time, and from
that moment on he never ceased in his activity as a painter,
architect, decorator, industrial designer, teacher, promoter
of photography via lectures and courses, experimenter of new
languages, and a unifier of artists. His photographic series
are numerous, and in many cases there is an edenic vision of
many subjects, as if he were a man waking up to the world for
the first time. Perhaps his being an African man educated in
Europe allowed him to see facets of our city, Buenos Aires, that
no native inhabitant perceived.
The traces left by Makarius are infinite; the man is no longer
with us, but his art remains. Ars longa, vita brevis.
