The Caillebotte legacy

OPINION

By Alina Tortosa

For the Herald                                                                         Sunday. September 10, 2000

There is that quota of anguish in the appreciation of contemporary art for the non initiated that causes them to look away, to withdraw, or to ignore it.  They may find it hard to come to terms with life as it is today, and do not want to be reminded of the hard edges.  A commited and talented artist has feelers that will interpret reality for him, before it becomes real to most people.   The work may appear far fetched or obsessed because he has consciously or uncousciously understood social, historical and biological processes ahead of most of his contemporaries. 

In restrospect,  the work of the Impressionists seems  harmless enough today.  Yet  in its own  time it caused a major outroar.   To most  people today, Impressionsism is a sort of aesthetic oasis.   It was not like that at the time. 

An  interesting example is what the french call "le leg. Caillebotte".   Gustave Caillebotte, one of the until recently less known impressionists,  when he died in 1984 left his art collection to the French nation "on condition that 'it should go neither to an attic, nor a provincial museum, but straight to the Luxembourg [the museum then devoted to the work of living artists} and later to the Louvre' "[1].    The  collection  was made up of   nineteen Pissarros,  fourteen Monets,  ten Renoirs, nine Sisleys, seven Degas, five Cézannes and four Mannets.  

Renoir, who together with Martial Caillebote,  Gustave's brother, was the executor of the legacy,  wrote to Henri Roujon, the Director of Fine Arts, informing him of the bequest.    As  Roujon was unsure of how to proceed, he asked for advise from established artists, and from his coleagues.   Jean-Léon Gerôme,  one of the official artists said that to accept the legacy  would be a sign of "moral turpitude"  and the end of the nation.    The burocrats,   Roujon included,  argued that "they did not have space to hang the collection, and some artists (such as monet and Pisarro) would be heavily over-represented"[2]. 

It took a long time for the French State to agree to the terms of the legacy.   In 1895 the Musée du Luxembourg received some of the work.   But it was only in 1928 when the government finally said that they would accept the remaining twenty-nine paintings.   The widow of Martial Caillebotte's brother then "repudiated the terms of the bequest".    Good for her!   And so much for the contemporary appreciation and success of Impressionist art.

Alina Tortosa

---

[1] The Chronicle of Impressionism,  Bernard Denvir,  Thames and Hudson,  London, 1993

[2].idem.

VERBOAMÉRICA

 El habla es el tapiz

en el que vamos tejiendo 

nuestra identidad

hilos de colores

y  otros transparentes

se entretejen en la trama

hablando bordamos

nuestra historia 

La nueva puesta en escena de parte de la colección del Malba nos la presenta de manera visualmente clara y despejada, respetando los espacios que cada obra necesita, a la vez que la interrelación entre ellas mismas y los textos que las sugieren o anuncian les confieren otra densidad.

El pensamiento fundamental y fundacional de Agustín Perez Rubio y Andrea Giunta,  los curadores, fue y es pensar cada obra en su entorno y su tiempo desde un lenguaje  vernáculo.  Lo cual, puesto asíparece sencillo.  No lo fue, si aceptamos que esta es la primera vez que se expone obra regional 

latinoamericana, sin que las formas de la misma se analice en los términos euronorteamericanos en los que se la ha descripto, estudiado y catalogado hasta ayer en muestras anteriores.

A la vez, se tomaron otras decisiones que aligeran y profundizan la proyección estética de las obras.  No se puso el acento en la historicidad ni en un seguimiento cronológico,  sí en su generación concep tual y  más importante aun visualmente  -  considerando que una muestra es una exhibición, el acto de mostrar –  en cómo se ven, como se acompañan, en el espacio compartido. 

Las pinturas matéricamente intensas, tan representativas de autores venerados como los pilares de la historia latinoamericana del arte, se benefician de la compañía de los diseños lábiles o abiertos en materiales que admiten o reflejan la luz de sus colegas histriónicos.   

Esta evolución en el renglón curatorial de ambos curadores es el resultado de años de estudios

intensos, de introspección,  análisis e intercambio de impresiones, pensamientos y conclusiones, aún en proceso. 

Si bien supuestamente en la región lo sabíamos, las obras y la puesta en escena de las mismas

aclaran e ilustran que no hay un arte latinoamericano, como no hay un arte norteamericano o un arte

europeo.  Tampoco hay una arte argentino o una arte brasileño o venezolano.  En cada país hay 

afinidades, tendencias y recursos materiales, o la falta de ellos, que marcan tendencias, sin llegar a 

definir un perfil autóctono.

Es una muestra que alienta varias visitas, por el placer de recorrerla, y para profundizar nuestra 

apreciación de lo que vemos.  Es interesante comparar las obras entre sí tomando nota de las fechas 

en que fueron hechas unas y otras. 

El catálogo 

El catálogo de Verboamérica, es más que un catálogo, en el sentido original de esta palabra, es un 

cuidadoso y exhaustivo estudio, escrito y visual, del arte de Latinoamérica, desde una mirada amplia e ilustrada.  Es el relato histórico contado respetuosamente de manera amena. De ahora en más es un 

libro central a la evolución del arte en nuestra América, ineludíble en cualquier biblioteca que se 

precie de tal.

Es de celebrar la decisión de imprimir este catálogo en una versión en español y otra en inglés, lo

que ha permitido que los textos se hayan impreso en un tamaño de font de cómoda lectura.

                                         

Liliana Porter: Wrinkle, wrinkle, little star

Buenos Aires Herald                                                              Sunday, November 23, 2003

On Sunday    

l                

By Alina Tortosa

For the Herald

Liliana Porter /Fotografía y Ficción, the show that opened last Tuesday at the Recoleta Cultural Centre in Cronopius, is a powerful statement on what an intelligent artist does with what is at hand.  Her highly poetical and understated work is a power station of contemporary multi disciplinarian aesthetics that works on several layers of perception: visual, literary, psychological, aesthetic and intellectual, far from your trodden conventional political correctness.

Porter (1941, Buenos Aires), a gifted draughtsman from childhood, attended the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes from the age of 12 in Buenos Aires, and in 1958 traveled to Mexico to attend the Universidad Iberoamericana, where she became intensely involved with print techniques.  In 1964 she arrived in New York for what she had planned as a short stay, but quickly came to terms with how much the city could afford her in terms of material and aesthetic opportunities and stayed on.  Grasping the current contemporary mood, she realized that her expressionist and ultra elaborate technical background were excessive and cumbersome. So she went back to basics starting with what was closest at hand: a sheet of white paper.

If a rose by any other name smells the same, in Wrinkle/Arruga, 1968, a sheet of white paper treated as medium for a work of art is still to a point a sheet of white paper, and yet in the progressive treatment of a crease on it Porter created an elliptical and substantial essay on meaning and matter.  The original sheet of paper, support or medium became a rite of passage from elaborate technique and expression to intuition, and from description to suggestion, beyond anything the artist had done before.

A nail, the shadow of a nail, a piece of string in Nail, 1972, or a hand pointing to a line in The line, 1973, are minimal metaphors on content and technique, on an elusive representation of a pragmatic reality, backed by what runs all through the show, a highly developed sense of humour linked to a poetical vision of the world at large.

In The Square, the 1973 series, the artist has drawn in pencil a square on its own, or this same square over the finger or fingers, or on the palm of the hand. She is introducing us into a virtual reality in the same way a writer uses words to tell a story or write a poem. Porter “wrote” square for us to read it.  In Untitled, the 1973 series, a hand holds a geometrical volume in one hand, while the lines of this same object are outlined on the other hand.  These sensual representations illustrate the gap as well as the link between the physical perception of reality and the knowledge of this perception.  We know that we know how it feels though we are not touching it.

Porter works tongue in cheek, playing games with herself and with us, her audience.  Porter’s Picasso was prompted by her desire to put her finger under the master’s drawing.  So she drew her own Picasso to be able to put her finger under the drawing by running a line in pencil over it.  This intention of turning the world into her playground explains much of her work. 

She takes images from literature, popular culture, politics, the bric-a-brac of daily life, draws them or sticks them on a canvas or on a sheet of paper, stands them on a shelf, draws lines to and from them, stands them next to or against totally irrelevant figures to create rare and awkward meetings. We see how they look into each other’s eyes in a pensive mood establishing what we imagine are unusual dialogues.   What does Pinocchio say to the man in a dark suit and hat? Or the man in a suit and hat to the chicken? A rather dark skinned Che looks up into the sky from a canvas while a rabbit looks at him from outside the canvas.

Is it the spirit of Alice in Wonderland running amok that sets up these impossible meetings and describes a reality beyond the real world we know? Porter has chosen to translate illusion into a visual scenario, playing games of hide and seek, of exquisite vitality to illustrate her perception of culture and of contemporary life.

Two films by Porter: “For You” and “Drum Solo” are shown in the context of this retrospective in two small rooms off the main exhibition premises.   The “action” into which the endearing inanimate characters are drawn illustrates the dramatic content of much of Porter’s work. It is in these films that we grasp the anguish and despair that is not that obvious in her visual art. In a sort of staccato mood the defenseless small toy figures lose their heads, they are ludicrously overfed to the point of engorgement or jump into an abyss.

Inés Katzenstein, the curator of this exhibition, looked conscientiously into Porter’s archives and body of work to design the show. Her conclusion was that what underlined the whole of her production was the use of photography, a medium Porter first used to record her work in other media and then developed into a discipline per se.

A well-illustrated catalogue published by the Centro Cultural Recoleta together with Malba/Colección Constantini is an updated textual story that runs through the whole of Liliana Porter’s career.  Essays by Inés Katzenstein, Mercedes Mac Donnell, Gabriel Rangel, Ana Tiscornia, Shifra Goldman, Ricardo Martín-Crosa, Miguel Briante, Pedro Cuperman, Florencia Bazzano-Nelson, Mari Carmen Ramírez, Charles Merewhether, Gerardo Mosquera, Gabriel Peluffo and Alberto Martín discuss every aspect of her work.

 (Liliana Porter /Fotografía y Ficción, Centro Cultural Recoleta, Sala Cronopius, Junín 1930. Until February 29).

Argentine art abroad

Buenos Aires Herald      126th Anniversary  1876 – 2002      Sunday, September 15, 2002

By Alina Tortosa

For the Herald

For a broad and clumsy assessment of the acknowledgement Argentine art has received abroad in the last twenty years, a look at the large sums paid at auctions in New York at Sotheby’s and Christies for work by a few Argentine artists will do.   But this commercial approach is more of an anecdote than a thoughtful and relevant analysis.  It does not describe accurately the real place of these artists in the world. 

Artists like Greco, Julio Le Parc, Victor Grippo, Xul Solar and David Lamelas, who have slowly made inroads into international art history, were not necessarily top priorities in the world art market in the 1980s and in the 1990s.  It is useful to remember that the price of work by artists relates to promotion and fashion rather than to quality.

It was not in the politically manipulated exhibitions of Argentine and Latin American art in the 1960s in the US, nor in the official art galleries in embassies or Latin American organizations in Europe and the US that Argentine art gained true appreciation. These spaces do not merit valuable critical acknowledgement as, for the most part, they are in charge of non-professionals in the art world, who have a rather parochial and nepotistic attitude toward who and what they show.

It was in the day to day interchange between artists and curators at home and abroad, and due to the opportunities and to the resources provided by foreign and local grants, exhibitions in galleries abroad, international publications, and by word of mouth that some of the best Argentine artists now in their 30s and 40s have become known abroad in the last fifteen or twenty years. This wider acknowledgement has reached the point where I feel that the role of the genial artist who lacks recognition in his own lifetime is démodé, a blurry and romantic destiny that does not apply in the late twentieth and early twenty-one centuries.  Not even in Latin America, and certainly not in Argentina.

This phenomenon of interchange and communication is global.  It relates to changes in the way artists work worldwide and to the way art critics and art historians in the so called First World opened their eyes to what non European or non US artists were doing.  In the twentieth century, up to the 1980s, the work by artists could still be placed within certain movements.  Because of this, as Jorge López Anaya, the well known Argentine art historian, has said, everything that artists outside the first world did was automatically considered a copy of what was being done in the major art centers, as for the most part they were working on the same lines.

But it is also true that the more progressive artists here were mainly focused on what their colleagues in the first world were doing.  In some cases, to an unhealthy extreme.

In the late 1980s the question of movements and separate disciplines within the visual arts gave way to many possibilities that could not be neatly placed into who was working in what style, as the very notion of style fell through. Also people the world over were beginning to think in terms of genetic and geographic roots, and the sense of belonging to a definite historical and geographical area became more important.  In Argentina, with few exceptions, the best artists were looking around their own habitat and into themselves to figure out their own creative resources.  Most of them were children of European immigrants, but by then Europe was no longer the ultimate goal, but a reference among others. 

The period of the Military Government in Argentina broke the link between one generation and the next.  The then young artists had to look around them to learn what the world was about.  In their isolation, they found ways to work at home.   And because they felt strongly the loss of a missing generation and  lacked social communion with their native artistic elders, they looked up to them rather than to their foreign counter parts.

Jorge Glusberg, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts then, and a most controversial figure, should be also given his due, as as the founder and director of the CAYC –Centre for Arts and Communication- he held seminars, prizes, exhibitions to which he invited prominent foreign intellectuals who worked in different disciplines.  These encounters gave the visitors the chance to see what was happening here, and local artists the chance to talk to them.

When in the 1990s European and US curators took to travel around the globe, they slowly began to understand the import of what was then called multiculturalism.  This meant that art across the borders of the First World should no be understood as a cultural mirror of the more sophisticated West, but as different ways of working worthwhile watching. 

Philippe Cyroulnik, who first came to BA in 1989, as a member of the jury for the Gunther Prize, invited Jorge Macchi, Roberto Elía, Martín Reyna and Pablo Suárez to show in the CREDAC -Centre Regional d'art contemporain- in Ivry-sur-Seine, France.  This was the first of his many trips to Argentina, and the beginning of a long association with Macchi, who has since then shown extensively abroad, as have done the others.

Greco from Buenos Aires and from Barcelona, Victor Grippo from Buenos Aires, Julio Le Parc from Paris, Liliana Porter from New York, David Lamelas from London, Paris, Berlin and mostly from Los Angeles, Leandro Erlich from New York, Jorge Macchi from Buenos Aires, are some of the names of the Argentine artists that are internationally known and respected as the best in their field.  They have become the visual and information network that represent us abroad and which has opened the way to their peers and to the new comers.

illustration by Liliana Porter, Black thread, 2007.

On work by Jorge Macchi and Gabriel Valansi Art beyond media illustration

Buenos Aires Herald                                                          Published Sunday, April 13, 2003

Art On Sunday

By Alina Tortosa

For the Herald

Art as an expressionist experience will never recover from the world post the blowing up of the twin towers and from the contemporary experience of the war in Iraq lived through the media.  Art as a strong expressionist catharsis is over for the duration, as images that try to reproduce the violent conflicts we have lived through, that we have seen on a screen, read about, or imagined, will either fall short or be redundant. 

Live drama and melodrama are provided daily by the ironic and sinister appearances and speeches of international and national politicians who preach peace as they wage an unnecessary war, who speak of evil as if they themselves were good, of safety as if they were careful, of economic stability as if they were concerned with the community well being rather than with their own economic profit.

What images could translate  what happened in Irak and elsewhere without being redundant?  Would we react to art visual statements that repeat what we have already seen in the newsreel? What does an artist do to create work that is acknowledged as art and not sociology, journalistic information or propaganda? 

A good contemporary artist translates into lines and colour, into other media, into vaguely reminiscent iconic language to suggest and imply rather than to assess.  In good contemporary art assessment is out, as too obviously political, too explicit, too coarsely invasive and not efficient.

As I write I think of works by Jorge Macchi and by Gabriel Valansi that refer to tragic situations in elegant undertones. Macchi’s threaded or woven newspaper cuttings of articles that reported tragic situations into elliptic minimal wall pieces.  The writing is literally on the wall, but we have to look for it, the first impression is one of utter beauty, rather than of despair.

Valansi, a photographer, uses and intervenes the media he has chosen to work with to illustrate his concerns with war and violence.  In Cosmos, 2000, on the blowing up of the Amia,  “he developed his basic theme […] into an astrological metaphor.  A myriad of planets break away from a point in space, generating disruptive energy.  As we look at it, we cannot grasp the pain involved, only the beauty of the small round figures breaking away from the axis.  Small planets that look at us from dark pupils, eyes that witness the danger and the damage,  without luring us into obvious and active despair”. 

And this is the key to tragedy, as in the plays by Sofocles and by Shakespeare, beauty interwoven with pain to the point in which they interrelate so closely that we cannot separate them. 

Jorge Macchi: a talented trickster

Buenos Aires Herald                                                                               Sunday, May 5, 2002

By Alina Tortosa

For the Herald

If ever an artist exemplified The dematerialization of art, proclaimed by Lucy Lippard in the book that answers to this title, first published in 1973, that artists is Jorge Macchi.  From extremely concrete objects and paintings to the current show at Ruth Benzacar, his work has dematerialized in substance and perceptually into poetical renderings of musical and socio-anthropological interpretations.

I would say without doubt, Macchi is the Argentine contemporary artist par excellence, an artist at his best.  He has worked quietly and coherently from his beginnings, looking into things and around, to create objects and situations that may relate to hypothetical situations, as yet unknown to him, as in the early paintings of the domes of cathedrals, or that subtly hint at what he has seen and experienced.  He still seems unaffected by the respect and recognition he merits, under a deceptive simplicity that could pass for modesty.  I would not trespass this simplicity, in the notion that he does not really know the import of what he has done.  He does. 

Fuegos de artificio, the name of the show, may be interpreted quite differently according to whether we translate it as “fire tricks” or as “fireworks”.  Fire tricks  -trick as ability, special skill, even as an act of magic- answers Macchi’s interpretation of the title.  It implies the creative resources that allow the artist to discuss a given subject in such a manner as to mask or play around with the original preoccupation or information, moving away from literal meanings into irony and/or poetical nuances.  It is a dematerialization –again- of literal meaning into sensitive perceptions that redefine a practical situation into a subtle rendering of it that the viewer may or may not grasp.  But even when he or she do not grasp it, the work is there in aesthetic splendour to intrigue, delight, or reject.   Fire works, of course, is the explosive instance in which a design is blown out into the air as a sort of celebration, to then disappear into a memory or into forgetfulness.  So it would be safe, perhaps, to keep to the first meaning.

Intimidad (Intimacy), the first piece to the right, as one goes in, is a small multiple structure that hints –ironically- at minimal art without conforming.  It is, rather, a quiet introspective icon that introduces us into the spirit of the exhibition.

If one should start on the left hand side, as one goes in, one may walk into the small video sitting room and look at Les feuilles mortes, the drawings in pencil on pages torn from a copy book.  Drawings on lose copybook pages at Ruth Benzacar’s are, of course, an instant reminder of the work by Liliana Porter, but in Macchi the content and the intentions are totally different.  The small punched out holes, the straight lines that look as if they had been dropped on the page and the white spaces create a rhythm, that go from lento to staccato.  

These drawings, Macchi says, were seminal to Ornamento, the wallpaper covered in tiny flowers, those flowers that finally fall in a dark heap at the end of the panel.  One wonders at the mental process that turned something quite complex into this deceptive simplicity.

In The speaker’s corner, he is weaving text and controversy, or the notions of text and controversy, into long strips of paper cuttings, stuck on the support with pins, on which inverted commas open and close on empty space.  The speaker’s corner, by the way, is the spot in Marble Arch, in Hyde Park, London, where people may go on Sunday to discuss or make speeches about anything, however outrageous.  This traditional weekly speaking out in public must have seemed originally hygienic to the Crown, a sort of vaccine against further evil.  Macchi adds new meanings to this basic intention.  This highly refined and elegant -adjectives that the author feels ill at ease with –contemporary and relatively precarious, if you will, tapestry is an essay on the intricate and subliminal paths of information and opinion.

Trained as an artist, Macchi eventually became involved with performance as well, both musical and theatrical.  He cherishes this interrelated intervention that drives each participant to take into account the work of others.  He does not feel this as a limitation, but as context and atmosphere that add to his own proposal. In La canción del final  (The last song), the blurry names of the cast and technicians of a given film reel in front of our eyes as they do traditionally at the end of a film.  The words that most people do not read, but that must be shown. More information that may not be duly processed by the reader or the viewer.

Music threads through the work, in the titles: Les feuilles mortes, Nocturne, Variations, in the video installation: La canción del final, in a score with music by Eric Satie on which the notes are written in pins, a wonderful piece.  This show exemplifies how Macchi has been able to achieve one of the aims he set out for himself years go: to translate musical language into visual work.

In Horizon, in a detached twilit room, the author has drawn, by sticking pins on the wall,

a straight line at eye level.  The title is descriptive, and yet, we may assume that the pins and the spaces in between, barely modified, may also have musical connotations: silence – sound – silence – sound.  Macchi has been working with pins as media for a very long time.  They design and redesign a specter of possibilities, visual and metaphysical, that have always been inherent in his work. And it is this mystic quality, impossibly to measure in terms of acknowledgement or success, that makes him a major artist.

On Jorge Macchi - From objects to theatrical installations

Buenos Aires Herald                                              Published Sunday, January 28, 2001

Jorge Macchi's art has evolved from primitive forms to conceptual work

By Alina Tortosa

For the Herald                                                               

The time has come to assess and trace the development of the work by Jorge Macchi (Buenos Aires, 1963), who won the First Prize of the Premio Banco de la Nación Argentina a las artesvisuales in November 2000.    As he basks in the respect and admiration of most of his colleagues and of contemporary art critics,  hailed as  the ultra neoconceptual figure by Eva Grinstein in La Nación, who baptised the present as the Macchi era,   I remembered when Pablo Suárez (Buenos Aires, 1937), an artist who was influential in shaping the criteria of several generations of young artists,  used to say of him that he was a happy maker of objects.  By which Suárez meant he was a craftsman rather than an artist (an appreciation that was not shared by Jorge López Anaya or Damian Bayon at the time).  What happened to the young boy who quietly worked away in wood and paint objects and canvas to become one of the more interesting conceptual artists of his generation? 

His first pieces were rough and primitive looking altarpieces in dark  wood, retablos,mystical in nature and anthropological in substance.  He painted on paper compositions that represented the cupola of European cathedrals that he longed to visit.  His work related to a geographical and historical past he felt he belonged to biologically.  When I met him in 1986 he was determined in a quiet way.   One could sense the strength and a certain assurance under his unassuming manner of who he was and of what he wanted.   

In 1989, a French curator, Philippe Cyroulnik, who had come as a member of the jury for the Gunther Prize, given out by Edgar Gunther, a German art collector who then lived in Paris, chose four artists to show in the CREDAC -Centre Regional d'art contemporain-  in Ivry-sur-Seine, France.  And Macchi, whose work had not been admitted to the Gunther Prize, was one of the four artists Cyroulnik chose to exhibit.  It was when he travelled to France in 1991 for the exhibition, together with Roberto Elía, Martín Reyna and Pablo Suárez, that he and Suárez met for the first time.  And it was also then, on this first trip and in conversations with Suárez, that he became aware of further possibilities in the making of art beyond the object itself.   It was an exhibition by the Israeli artist, Haïm Steinbach, in which Steinbach had chosen manufactured grocery goods and set them on shelves that showed him that some artists had taken Duchamp's attitude towards art further and had adopted the repetition and juxtaposition of seemingly worthless items to explore social and psychological structures.

On that first trip, as he lived in Paris for two years in la Cité des Arts (Beca Braque1993-1994),  and later, in other trips, he felt that the work of art as a physical object was dissolving into space, it was losing weight,  that it was irrelevant in a wider context unless the architectural parameters in which it would be shown were taken into account.  So he worked on pieces that related to the space in which they would be displayed.  

In  April 1994 he exhibited at the Galerie Jorge Alyskewycz 32 morceaux d'eaux,  the decomposition of the River Seine in gouache into 32 fractions, that represented as many bridges, under a long glass that drew a  line the length of the gallery.  He wanted to transform the liquidity of the river into an illusion of liquidity.    The texture of the paint and of the paper were solid, and yet, the illusion was there.  We see how he had lightened his work.

In an exhibition shown first at the Casal de Catalunya in Buenos Aires and then in London in 1995, searching south,  one of his pieces,  a pillow behind lines of tense wire illustrates a pentagram.   This reference to music, and later, the need for music,  will come up again and again in his work.

His subsequent trips to Europe to exhibit in different cities: Extremely recent works,Rotterdam, 1996,  The wondering golfer,  Antwerp,  The killing tear (in collaboration with Miguel Rothschild), Paris, Incidental music, Essex, in 1998, and others, reinforced his first European impression that work had lost consistency, that it ought to be staged into existence in situ, and  was, therefore, ephemerous by nature.

His current work is profoundly influenced by an in depth relationship with the theatre.  In 1998 he took part in a Taller de Experimentación Escénica, organised by Fundación Antorchas, together with other other visual artists, writers, musicians, actors and theatre directors.  This workshop helped him to understand the fictional character of a work of art.  It sparked the energy that caused his work to radiate into different disciplines.   What impressed him most about the theatre was that to depend on other  people is inevitable.  And this  working out of everybody's input into a general pattern to achieve a final collaboration suits him well, as it exacts a dynamic attitude from those who participate.   Macchi feels that he has found a positive creative energy in the theatre that is not available in the visual arts.

As he strolls about the city he will notice things on which he will work in his studio.   He starts by painting them, for he still needs this media to grasp  why he was drawn by a certain visual image.  This painting of a motif, or photographing it, works as an  appropriation that serves him as first base.  It is never  enough,  so he will brood on it until he can work it into a structure that he feels represents the way in which he wants to tell the story.  The original motif will develop into an installation or a theatrical setting in which the gaze of the viewer and his sense of apprehension are taken into account.   This is how he worked on Publicidad,the theatrical installation that won him the First Prize of the Premio Banco Nación.

Going back full circle, there was more to the happy object maker in the very beginning than mere craftsmanship, for his objects were tainted with a mysterious depth that went far beyond a conventional approach to matter and content.  The use of nails imbedded in the wood to draw landscapes or patterns, feathers covering a panel, or the imprint of hen claws imbedded in the support  were ominous signs of portents to come. 

Verde que te quiero

Verde que te quiero verde

Texto de la muestra sobre el paisaje desde el arte contemporáneo argentino en la sala Cronopios del Centro Cultural Recoleta – mayo 2004  Por Alina Tortosa, curadora.

  

Esta producción curatorial, como la obra misma de los artistas que participan, surge de una preocupación bastante anterior a la articulación de la propuesta.  El paisaje como entorno es, en primera instancia, una vivencia de los sentidos.  Uno siente el paisaje aún antes de verlo, de analizarlo.  Es el entorno supuestamente “natural” que se tradujo en sensaciones y en sentimientos antes de que lo pensáramos en palabras, en imágenes, en líneas y colores. 

Las palabras de Miguel Ocampo refuerzan los conceptos anteriores.“El paisaje es preponderante en mi pintura.  /Consciente o inconscientemente mis cuadros, tanto abstractos como descriptivos, rara vez dejan de tener connotaciones de la naturaleza. /Ver y mirar es lo que me mueve al trabajo. El movimiento, lo inasible de la luz, una secreta estructura de geometría no euclidiana, totalizadora e indefectiblemente armónica, son mis intereses más estimulantes.”  Por primera vez, Ocampo expone dibujos, trabajos de gran belleza, cuyos trazos refinadísimos recuerdan la elegancia de algunos paisajes japoneses.

La idea de mostrar artistas que trabajan sobre el paisaje surgió de nuestra admiración por las obras de Fermín Eguía, Juan José Cambre, Eduardo Stupía y Guadalupe Fernández, artistas de distintas generaciones que pintan el paisaje en un proceso que se reconoce auténtico desde una mirada contemporánea. Diría que estas dos condiciones han sido definitorias a la hora de elegir los artistas contemporáneos y sus obras: la coherencia en el tiempo desde una visión personal.

La elección de la obra de los artistas históricos, acotada por razones de tiempo y de acceso, surgió de la necesidad de establecer un  diálogo entre los que trabajan hoy y los que trabajaron ayer.  Un diálogo que se resuelve en un tono quedo y poético. De ninguna manera hemos tratado de trazar un recorrido histórico que explique el desarrollo lineal de las trayectorias en juego, ni abarcar todo el espectro paisajista argentino.

El paisaje como punto de partida del sentido de identidad se da espontáneamente, lo registre el sujeto en forma activa o no.  Las características topográficas, el clima, la flora y la fauna son datos que han influenciado la percepción y la sensibilidad, o la falta de ella, de los habitantes de cada zona.  El entorno geográfico primitivo de cada individuo influencia su percepción de otros entornos, próximos o lejanos, dentro del territorio nacional o extranjero.

Por eso el paisaje no es un tema del pasado, ni es un tema aleatorio, poco relacionado con una visión conceptual y contemporánea del arte o de la vida. Todo lo contrario.  Estamos ligados a él por la impronta que la experiencia específica  ha dejado en nuestra conciencia subliminal y en nuestra memoria consciente.  Nos han influido nuestra relación física inmediata: el contacto con las diferentes formas y texturas de los elementos que lo componen, la experiencia de un clima en particular, y nuestra relación emocional con todos estos elementos, a través de impresiones y de recuerdos.  Un acercamiento intelectual o conceptual al tema no puede negar estos datos.

El análisis o la descripción del paisaje en el arte no es necesariamente un relato pictórico reconocible.  Está implícito en la obra despojada de Jorge Macchi y es explícito en la obra de Nicolás Uriburu.  Macchi  analiza distintas situaciones desde una mirada íntima, casi secreta.   Uriburu construye un mensaje claro y literal en defensa de la naturaleza diezmada por el hombre. Esta preocupación es el eje alrededor del cual ha construido su obra.

Para nosotros, testigos del trabajo de los autores participantes, lo interesante es la interrelación que se crea entre los datos originales y la resolución del artista.   Cómo recibió la información, como la procesó, hasta donde llevó su investigación de un entorno determinado, y con qué medios e imágenes propone su interpretación personal.

La pinturas serenas y transparentes de Pablo Suárez de 1979 y 1980  ilustran una de sus viejas preocupaciones sobre el paisaje, la perspectiva muy particular de la Pampa en la que todo está al mismo nivel y donde la tierra y el cielo se unen en la  línea del horizonte y los caminos se pierden en el mismo cielo.

La presencia de la Pampa, como factor determinante, se ve también en la obra de Juan Becú, uno de los participantes  más jóvenes.  El artista pinta la naturaleza en técnica impecable.  En el primer plano de esta obra de largo aliento se lee el esfuerzo de algunos habitantes  por crear entornos rurales amenos, a la manera de algunos jardines europeos, para contrarrestar la visión austera, amplia y despojada del entorno.

Una obra esfumada de Alejandro Rainieri enfatiza el paisaje extendido contra el horizonte.  El tono romántico establece un diálogo con otras pinturas y con los objetos.

Los telas de Juan José Cambre y de Eduardo Stupía se complementan.  Cada uno trabaja el tema de manera distinta y ambos son ejemplos claves del resultado contemporáneo de investigaciones exhaustivas desde técnicas tradicionales.  El “Blanco” de Cambre, elegante y sutil, es tan apasionado en la intención como  el S/T de Stupía, en el que los trazos enérgicos se resuelven en forma explosiva.. Cambre ha llevado a cabo una investigación profunda sobre el uso y las posibilidades del color a través del paisaje. Stupía dibuja sus paisajes con trazos espesos o delgados, casi caligráficos. Ambas obras, tan diferentes entre si, son medulares a esta muestra.

También son claves las acuarelas de Fermín Eguía, figura de culto en el medio de las artes visuales.  Su obra intimista es bellísima, siempre poética, y en algunos casos, irónica.  Es el primer artista que se menciona a la hora de pensar el paisaje en el arte contemporáneo argentino. 

 El bosque de Josefina Robirosa, además de un paisaje, es un homenaje sentido a la trayectoria de esta artista que ha pintado el género durante tantos años.

Hay trabajos, objetos, que han sido mostrados en otros contextos como objetos sin más o como instalaciones abstractas.    Dentro del entorno de esta muestra conforman las líneas, volúmenes y espesores de una topografía reconocible como tal.  Los accidentes e incidentes del paisaje rural se reconocen en las instalaciones de piso de Jane Brodie, de Elba Bairon, de Irene Banchero y de Livio de Luca, y en las resmas de papel sobre una base de Daniel Joglar.  Estas obras, despojadas de todo subterfugio, son esencialmente poéticas.

Irene Banchero asocia el paisaje con la contemplación, con el recorrido de la mirada que se detiene, que  “busca, describe, nombra y recuerdauna limitación física dolorosa?

Los dibujos en pequeños formatos sobre seda de Matía Duville conforman una instalación de pared de gran refinamiento. El artista los describe como micro relatos en los cuales algo sucede.   Duville refuerza la imagen dibujada retirando hilos de la seda, por lo que esta es soporte y es medio. La superficie rasgada intriga y desorienta al espectador.

Juan Andrés Videla ha dado una vuelta de tuerca y ha depurado su trabajo, dibujando en grafito sobre fórmica blanca.  Con menos trazos y materia que en obras anteriores ha logrado una atmósfera clara y sensible.

 Hay connotaciones misteriosas  y mágicas en los paisajes de Marcia Schwarz, de Guadalupe Fernández y de Florencia Böhtlingk.  “Marciana”, la obra de Schwarz es parte de una serie que expuso en Recoleta  en la que denunciaba las condiciones precarias e indigentes en la que viven muchos de los habitantes de las provincias del Norte Argentino. Esta obra aislada de su contexto anterior se la ve por lo que es, sin mensajes ajenos al hecho estético: una imagen telúrica de gran belleza que proyecta una energía estremecedora.

Para Fernández pintar es una necesidad existencial, es el rito y el gesto elocuente que sostiene y alimenta su equilibrio emocional. Las imágenes de Fernández tienen su raíces en un romanticismo melancólico, una herencia de su infancia transcurrida en Suecia.  Hoy esa melancolía se nutre también de paisajes nativos, del Tigre, entre otros, y de otra luz.  Esta última obra en tonalidades verdes y azules es una versión bellísima de un paisaje vernáculo imaginario.

Para Böghtlingk pintar es también un gesto esencial cotidiano en el que elabora su libido y un sentido estético formado en comunión con los grandes espacios del sur argentino en su infancia, y  actualmente en sus largas estadías en Misiones.

Las pinturas de Nahuel Vecino se reconocen por su tono académico.  Las de Christian Prunello, por su sutileza. 

Sandro Pereira ha dejado de lado, por el momento, el objeto y la escultura para pintar, agregando nuevos datos a su identidad de artista. Su obra es misteriosa y seductora.    En el caso de Héctor Meana, exponemos una obra conocida, en lugar de sus últimas obras que se abren a otros caminos, por parecernos que ésta ilustra mejor el sentido vernáculo y romántico de la muestra.

Ana López aclara sobre  “El viento”, su poética instalación de pared en cerámica y acuarela sobre papel, “el viento es lo más parecido al suspiro y al soplo, algo que se siente aunque no se vea”.  López lo relaciona con el hálito de vida que se transmite de un lugar a otro, con las semillas y con los aromas.

Fotografía

No solo de talento se nutre la fotografía contemporánea. Es necesario también que sus autores trabajen con buenos materiales y cuiden puntillosamente las distintas etapas de producción de la obra, para que ésta tenga una presencia que signifique.  Ambas condiciones, talento y calidad, se dan en la obra de Peter Merts, Diego Ortiz Múgica, Silvia Rivas y Carlos Trilnick. 

“Pehuén”, fotografía de Oscar Carballo, es parte de su ensayo “Buró Escolar”.  Un ómnibus de colegio en una tormenta de nieve - en parte recuerdo, en parte comentario, en parte foto analógica, en parte intervención digital- describe un panorama sobrecogedor e inquietante de gran belleza.

En “Ensayos sobre el parecido secreto”, la instalación de pared Carina Cagnolo,  las  tomasfotográficas de paisajes brumosos se desarticulan sobre la pared en dibujos que las reproducen en forma aleatoria como piezas de un rompecabezas.   ¿De dónde surge la obra de un artista? ¿En qué se “inspira”? ¿Cuál es la relación entre la “realidad” del  mundo en el que habita y cuál es su percepción de esa realidad?

 Para algunos artistas el paisaje es un tema entre otros, que les permite ejercer una disciplina determinada, llegan a él de manera arbitraria; para otros artistas es un tema ineludible, como en el caso de Andrea Elías, quien escribe: “El paisaje no me ha dejado opción, se me ha impuesto de una manera brutal y mi trabajo es en definitiva una manera de ver qué hago con esto”.  Elías elabora la nostalgia por su tierra de origen y la extrañeza que le produce la tierra a la que se ha mudado creando un fotomontaje en el que se unen estos escenarios afectivamente antagónicos.

La imagen del árbol se repite en la serie de cuatro fotografías de Ignacio Iasparra, con sucesivos cambios de luz, reforzándose a ella misma.  Vistas de la llanura pampeana en las tomas de Isabel Lacau ilustran su mirada atenta al detalle y a los cambios atmosféricos.  Julie Weisz se ha apartado de ensayos anteriores captando escenas naturales románticas.

La fotografía de Esteban Pastorino refuerza la visión de la tierra que se extiende indeterminadamente. 

Julio Fuks, quien también analiza la llanura desde su obra, expone fotos que se acercan a ella tangencialmente.

La serie de fotografías de Gastón Bourquin ilustran el paisaje desde una mirada atenta y rigurosa. Y nuestra mirada contemporánea se nutre a su vez del talento de este artista cuyo legado es una parte importante de nuestro patrimonio artístico.

Peter Merts, fotógrafo de los Estados Unidos, durante su estadía en la Argentina en el 2002 viajó a  Salta y a Jujuy, adonde tomó las fotos que se exhiben en esta muestra.  Estas tomas son la continuación de su ensayo anterior “Solitude” (Soledad), que Merts no traduce como sentirse solo, si no como estar solo en comunión con la naturaleza.  Su búsqueda estética y espiritual lo lleva a rescatar visualmente aquellos espacios en los que quedan vestigios del hombre, pero en los que el hombre mismo está ausente.

Video

Con la mirada atenta al entorno rural desde lo visual y desde lo sonoro Silvia Rivas y Carlos Trilnik han creado para esta muestra una video proyección que podemos penetrar y en la que podemos instalarnos. Esta obra es un ensayo sobre los sentimientos y los espacios ambiguos que se dan entre la fruición de los sentidos ante un panorama visual placentero y el malestar sugerido por lo que acecha, que se insinúa desde una banda de sonidos, fuera de nuestra área de visión y que se refiere a nuestra historia temprana –en este caso el sonido del galope del malón.  Es la impronta que la cultura y la información imprimen sobre la experiencia inmediata. Es un contrapunto entre la belleza natural aparente y la belleza de un drama que no termina de definirse.

Daniel García, reportero gráfico, se distrajo de su función laboral, casi sin darse cuenta,  fotografiando cielos tormentosos.  El resultado es “Cielos barrocos”, la video proyección en la que elabora su duelo por el padre que se había ido “al cielo” cuando era niño. 

Margarita Wilson Rae grabó en video una escena durante la cual ella cava en la tierra la fosa en la que después entierra las caracolas de cerámica que ha modulado antes.  Son imágenes telúricas y rituales, en las que la tierra misma, el terrón de tierra y las raíces que lo surcan, anuncian la necesidad dramática y poética de encontrar el lugar apropiado para enterrar sus desvelos.  Es una ceremonia de iniciación en la que el sujeto pasa de un estado a otro.

“Verde que te quiero verde” es la construcción  poética de una naturaleza botánica, acogedora o alienante, seductora y misteriosa.  La cita a García Lorca del título nos refiere a la ilusión, siempre latente, siempre renovada, de encontrar el paraíso terrenal.

Ocho artistas históricos y cuarenta y un artistas contemporáneos de distintas generaciones –desde Fermín Zuazu (1985) a Miguel Ocampo (1922)-, originarios de diferentes provincias y un fotógrafo de los Estados Unidos, construyen e ilustran un paisaje multimediático rico y alentador.  Pintura, dibujo, fotografía, grabado, performance, video, instalaciones de piso y de pared conforman un panorama dinámico que ilustra la capacidad creativa de nuestros artistas.   Ni la pintura ha muerto, como se pretendió muchas veces a través de la historia, ni el arte ha dejado de ser un proyecto vital y sensible.   

On the essence of poetry - work by Alfredo Prior

Buenos Aires Herald  / Art On Sunday  / Published Sunday, March 16, 2003.  

By Alina Tortosa  / For the Herald

On the essence of poetry - A retrospective of Alfredo Prior

There is nothing like a retrospective to confirm or to question an artist’s achievement. Isolated work and partial exhibitions are symptomatic and symbolic of an artist’s talent and coherence, but it is in a retrospective that we can seriously determine whether he holds his own or not as a visual artist.

Tribulaciones de un chino en Roma y otras tribulaciones sobre papel (Tribulations of a Chinaman in Rome and other tribulation on paper), the title of Alfredo Prior’s (1952, Buenos Aires) current retrospective at the MAMba, gives us the cue to the low keyed erudition and graceful ironic narrative that runs through Prior’s work. A typical example of his roundabout shrewdness is typified by his proposal to publish excerpts of previous interviews when asked to write a few lines for the catalogue.  This allowed him to choose exactly what he wanted to carry across to the reader, creating a certain distance from himself as author of what he had said, due to the past quality of the interviews.

The work dates from 1982 to 2002. There is the series Osarios  (1982-1984)– his “Bear series” painted in muted warm colours in small sizes that would grow into large vertical compositions much later. The painter and his model, The beginning and the end of the snow, Atlas, Siberia Blues, Saint Anthony’s temptation represent his narrative work. In the Chinese hairdos, Scenes from a Chinese Restaurant in the Stone Age, pencil, silver marker and Chinese stamps (ivory and rubber) and Complete Chinese Operas series the author works with blank space to create subtle and refined compositions. In the Sweeping the fallen leaves series, horizontal compositions in ink and gin tonic on paper, Prior is at his most concrete, creating almost three-dimensional fields. Please, don’t miss the gin tonic detail as medium. The layout of the exhibition, designed by Laura Buccellato, the museum director and by Prior himself, responds exactly to the austere refinement of his work.

It is a beautiful and poetical exhibition.  Definitely, not to be missed.

Buenos Aires Herald.  Sunday, October 6, 2002

Art and politics in the 1960s

By Alina Tortosa

For the Herald

Arte y política en los 60 (Art and politic in the 60s), the exhibition at Salas Nacionales, curated by Alberto Giudice and funded by the Banco Ciudad Foundation, is a historical exhibition of the visual arts of the 1960s in Argentina, as well as an academic feat due to the research work that went into putting this show together. It is also a lucid reminder that it is impossible, in the long run, to deny the realities we do not approve of, or to ignore them as non relevant circumstances.  Above all, it is a heart wrenching vision into a past that clearly announced the painful realities of the national and international present. 

To some, memories of the noisy and boisterous exhibitions introducing the new contemporary visual art languages at the Di Tella Institute -technical innovations as well as performances and installations- and the expressionist figuration of artists who denied abstraction in painting as a decadent bourgeois taste, are synonymous of a time when art in Argentina was actually fun and seemed to take off into a world sphere. To others, it was the time when the young avant-garde artists, after successfully moving away from traditional techniques into conceptual work, felt that an art expression that was finally meant as an exhibition or a cultural performance per se was not enough, and took it upon themselves to move away from the show room into the street and into life.

The show covers “a long decade”, as it reads in the catalogue, from 1958 to 1972. Collages by Kenneth Kemble from 1958 and by Antonio Berni from 1962 represent urban material misery that in the case of Berni would develop into the Juanito Laguna and Ramona series. There was a time when one could ignore the derelict environments depicted in Berni´s work or the sordid implications of the relationship between Ramona and her clients by not paying attention, by pretending one did not know or one did not see. Today one cannot look away because Juanito Laguna is not conveniently hidden in a villa miseria or shanty town, we find him every evening looking into our own litter at our doorstep. As to Ramona, one can understand that she was trying to make a living beyond a low paid job, but what can one say of women in highly paid political jobs who wanted so much more and stopped at nothing in their greediness. Is it necessary to name names? One has seen them in action and in the glossy pages of magazines in their expensive apparels as if the world belonged to them.

Under the name of Espartaco (Spartacus), after the Roman enslaved labourer (d. 71 B.C.) and rebel leader, Ricardo Carpani, Mario Mollari and Juan Manuel Sánchez in 1957, and Juana Elena Diz, Pascual Di Bianco, Esperilio Bute and Carlos Sessano in 1958, joined forces to work on art within the labour movement.  They aimed at painting murals, following the first attempts by Spilimbergo, Berni and Castagnino who had founded Taller de Arte Mural (Mural Art Workshop) after the visit of Siqueiros –the Mexican muralist artist- to Buenos Aires in the 1930s. The paintings and drawings by Carpani and Di Bianco are strong figurative compositions. The rock solid rounded figures, of men mostly, are robotic in character. They are strong and redundant, imperative in their movement forward, or in their barricade attitudes. Or lost in dark despair as huge hands and eyes spread out on the support and dark open mouths cry out as in Carpani’s poster on the Cordobazo.  Julia Elena Diz characters are softer, rural in nature rather than urban, with strong native features. In Mario Mollari’s Campesino (Peasant) one may read the anguish and the deadly fatigue in the stretched muscles of the body and in his distorted features.

Ernesto Deira, Rómulo Macció, Luis Felipe Noé and Jorge de la Vega showed for the first time as La Neo Figuración in 1961, opening up a venue of expressionist figurative work, together with Antonio Seguí and Juan Carlos Castagnino, followed by Carlos Alonso, Carlos Gorriarena, Juan Carlos Distéfano, Lea Lublin and others.  Their work was visceral and political, immersed in feeling and neurosis, critical of a prudish society that covered up its innate violence with apparent discipline and/or circumspect politeness. 

Pop art by Marta Minujín, art and mail art by Edgardo Vigo, premonitory conceptual pieces by Horacio Zabala, political denunciation through drawings and objects by León Ferrari are some of the names we know and remember. But there are other names and work we do not know or we have forgotten. To bring these artists and their pieces, writings and actions into the limelight is also a major achievement of this show.

Tucumán Arde (Tucumán on fire), Violencia (Violence), Insurrección (Insurrection), Vietnam, The Cuban Revolution and the murder of the Che Guevara, the Kennedy murders, May ’68, Nelson Rockefeller’s ill fated visit to Latin America in 1969, are in the show: a vital, bleeding, political fresco that announces guerrilla war fare, government repression, the Gulf War, Irak, the Amia, the rapacious sordid impulses of Menem and his entourage and of the Bushes, father and son, the Twin Towers, Afghanistan and hunger and desolation in Argentina. 

It is an exhibition rich in images and ideas, in social and political background.  One is moved, amazed and disturbed by the coherence and insight of those artists who understood what was happening and the future implications of what was happening long before others could even admit that something was wrong. One cannot but admire, celebrate and commune with their thoughts and their deeds, their courage and their commitment. One knows what it has cost some of them, in some cases their lives, in others the lives of their children. And yet they worked on, at home and in exile, acknowledged or ignored. Their artwork has today a sacramental value; it is the outward sign of inward grace, as read the Old Catholic catechism.

An artist, a writer, an actor is there to do what nobody has asked him or her to do because he or she have this urge, this visceral and psychological need to do so. This vocation, this drive may be painful, difficult to understand at times by the very people who undergo it, but it is there. It is a gift not to be thrown away, to be explored and developed against all odds. And this is what the artists whose work is on show at the Palais de Glace  have done.  Accepted their gifts and worked them out to understand and explain what was happening in their own country and in the world in their own time.

An excellent catalogue was published for this exhibition that reads as modern History with capital H.

(Arte y política en los ’60, Salas Nacionales de Exposición, Palais de Glace, Posadas 1725. Until October 27).

It is too abstract…

Buenos Aires Herald. Published Sunday,  October 1, 2000.

Art on Sunday

It is too abstract… 

As we know through linguistics, psychology, sociology, etc., our choice of words, and the use we give them, defines social and cultural innuendos.   The same word used in a different context, or by different people, has different meanings.

To those who are not initiated into contemporary art, anything vaguely modern is abstract art, or anything vaguely abstract appears to them as modern.  

In an excellent book on Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), one of the great modern masters of abstract or non figurative art, -the authors, Harry Holtzman and Martin S. James -Thames and Hudson, 1987-, tell an interesting and revealing story of Mondrian’s interpretation of abstraction. 

At a lunch at Peggy Guggenheim’s house, in which the surrealist artists Max Ernst and André Breton were present, as well as Marcel Duchamp, the hostess asked Mondrian what he thought of the paintings -fantasy landscapes- of the surrealist Ives Tanguy.  His reply was quick and to the point: “It is too abstract, too abstract for me!”

(Published together with a reproduction of Piet Mondrian's  Broadway Boogie-Woogie, oil on canvas, 1942-43).