S/T: sobre homosexualidad masculina

Inauguración en Elsi del Río. 7 de septiembre al 2 de octubre 2004

S/T

Sobre homosexualidad masculina

Yo hombre

necesito de otro hombre

necesito de él para ser yo 

en él me veo reflejado

contenido y representado 

me atraen en él quien soy 

quien podría llegar a ser

quien sería si me atreviese.

Los arquetipos heterosexuales no significan para un hombre homosexual otra cosa que un proyecto utópico ajeno. Son parte de su historia familiar, se interrelaciona con ellos desde la amistad o desde lo laboral, pero escapan a su mundo afectivo sexual y sensual íntimo.

Este hombre necesita de otro hombre para conocerse profundamente.  Para reconocerse como un ser sensible, pensante, que opera en un mundo del cual es parte, del cual quiere ser parte y en el que quiere dejar una impronta.

Como entre los heterosexuales, no se trata de ser de una manera o de otra. El abanico de la identidad homosexual es amplísimo. Se dan todas las posibilidades, desde las más penosas y sórdidas a las más admirables y heroicas, pasando por caracteres irreconocibles como tales, personajes neutros, dado que la homosexualidad se da en todo tipo de entorno cultural, social y económico, y en todo tipo de hombres.

Hemos elegido artistas de distintas tendencias estéticas que trabajan sobre el hombre con intenciones diversas.

Mirtha Bermegui (1963, Buenos Aires - ) trabaja sobre “lo amoroso”.  Sus obras ilustran un erotismo alegre y desprejuiciado.   Alina Schwarcz (1979, Buenos Aires) rescata con su cámara situaciones domésticaspróximas tiernas. 

Pablo Suárez  (1937, Buenos Aires) ha pintado y modelado muchas veces el mismo personaje en distintas circunstancias domésticas o azarosas.  Son siempre las mismas facciones, en este caso el personaje exhala su imagen sobre el perfil sutil de una mano abierta.  El título: “Leo en tu mano un destino de riquezas ocultas, hombres sumergidos y un obsesivo sueño” (1989) define la naturaleza literaria y narrativa de mucha de la obra de este autor.   

Los trabajos de Feliciano Centurión (1962, San Ignacio, Paraguay – 1996, Buenos Aires ) celebran la vida y la ternura, el amor y la alegría. Sus frazadas, bordados, dibujos y pinturas representan el espacio onírico y vital desde el cual el artista comprendía la vida.

En “Wet dreams”, un film corto de Julio Chaile (1962, Buenos Aires), el autor y Neiber, un artista invitado, recrean escenas oníricas. Si bien Chaile no las relaciona explícitamente con la vida real, algunas escenas sugieren situaciones que el espectador puede llegar a relacionar con el dolor y con la enfermedad.

La fluidez del trazo de los dibujos (2004)  de Leo Ciaccio (1969. Banfield, Pcia. De Buenos Aires), y los brillos que iluminan parcialmente las figuras, le otorgan a las escenas eróticas explícitas un aire despejado y alegre.  Son celebraciones refinadísimas del acto sexual entre dos hombres.

Juan Tessi (1972, Lima, Perú) eligió para modelos de sus retratos personajes anónimos. En este caso, soldados del Este de Europa, o una semblanza de figuras militares, arquetipos, sobre las que el artista deja correr su fantasía y su imaginación, recreándolos.

Sebastiano Mauri (1972, Milán, Italia) ha pintado sus personajes despojados de todo detalle que los defina dentro de un campo determinado, sea este familiar o profesional, para no distraer nuestra atención de sus características esenciales como individuos. 

Sergio De Loof  (1961, Buenos Aires) diseñador de ropa y de interiores, actor de acciones multimediáticas, pintor y fotógrafo, en este caso ha seguido con su cámara paso a paso el encuentro amoroso de una pareja de hombres.  Las cuatro fotos que exponemos en la muestra son parte de esta serie.

El dibujo de 1932 de Gaston Lachaise  (1882-1935) , escultor estadounidense de origen francés, representa un travesti.  Este artista trabajó sobretodo desnudos femeninos en madera, piedra y metal. El erotismo explícito de sus figuras simples y dinámicas desafiaron en su momento el sentido puritano de su entorno.

S/T se plantea como una primera observación nuestra del mundo homosexual masculino, desde imágenes y desde el lenguaje, que propone, en primerísima instancia, abolir preconceptos y arquetipos estructurados.  Analizamos al hombre como eje de su propia sensibilidad, como el ejecutor y receptor de su libido.  El deseo por el otro, por el otro que es él, a la vez que el otro, como forma de identidad social y sexual.

Vemos esta muestra como la primera de una serie, como el primer paso de un camino a recorrer. Un camino arriesgado y largo, sabemos que empieza aquí pero no sabemos adónde nos lleva.  Arriesgado, porque como curadora y autora hablo desde un conocimiento intelectual precario del tema y no desde la homosexualidad misma.  Largo, porque las definiciones y las experiencias se extienden ad infinitum.

Alina Tortosa

Buenos Aires, agosto 2004

Fotografías de José Risso

Fotografías de José Risso

Escrita por: Alina Tortosa

Publicada en El País, Uruguay

La presencia del fotógrafo José Risso se afirma cada día más en el escenario creativo uruguayo. El creador ha expuesto en Galería del Paseo, el Centro Cultural de España CCE, en la Fundación Atchugarry, enel Museo Zorrilla, y fue seleccionado  en un grupo muy reducido de artistas en el  55° Premio Nacional de Artes Visuales Wifredo Díaz Valdéz 2012. Sobre él ha escrito varias veces la crítica y curadora argentina residente en Uruguay Alina Tortosa. ARTE presenta ahora algunas obras de este incitante creador y los textos de Tortosa sobre su obra. Alicia Haber

“Perfilando el horizonte” i

José Risso Florio, estudió fotografía con Roberto Riverti y Panta Astiazarán y técnicas de laboratorio en blanco y negro con Carlos Porro. Sus trabajos fotográficos son elaboraciones cuidadas y rigurosas de los temas que enfoca.  Le ha dedicado varios ensayos al registro de predios y construcciones históricas fuera de los recorridos habituales.  Justamente ha sido esta la base de su trabajo: rescatar y celebrar el patrimonio nacional a través de imágenes analógicas en blanco y negro.  En este caso, su serie de árboles pone en relevancia el valor de especímenes autóctonos que hacen a la identidad del  paisaje uruguayo.

“El paisaje como punto de partida de la identidad”ii

El paisaje como punto de partida del sentido de identidad se da espontáneamente, lo registre el sujeto en forma activa o no.

La fotografía se ha diversificado en procesos técnicos y creativos diversos y distantes unos de otros. Versiones analógicas y digitales, stills de video, enfoques directos o elípticos, e imágenes intervenidas, han ampliado este arte visual más allá de nuestros conocimientos y de nuestras expectativas. El artista fotógrafo ha dejado de ser, en la mayoría de los casos, un testigo ocular del entorno para convertirse en un creador de fantasías. Imágenes impresas sobre distintos soportes, o proyectadas en el espacio, deleitan, confunden o intrigan al espectador.

José Risso Florio se ha mantenido al margen de búsquedas técnicas y visuales ajenas a una visión directa de los temas que enfoca. Sus fotos analógicas en blanco y negro nos presentan imágenes del paisaje rural uruguayo, un tema central a sus intereses, recurrente en sus ensayos visuales.

Si bien lo que quería fotografiar en un principio fueron troncos y ramas en encuadres que se vieran como formas abstractas, escribe el autor, también fotografié el árbol buscando un entorno al mismo. Y es de estos árboles que trata la muestra, siguiendo con la serie expuesta en la Galeria del Paseo bajo el título de Perfilando el horizonte, en el contexto del Día del Patrimonio.

Las fotos de Risso son testimonios de un mundo secreto al que el artista accede espontáneamente: Recorrí caminos vecinales y senderos, a veces sin saber adónde desembocaban.

Las escenas tomadas proyectan el silencio y la austeridad, lo rústico y lo precario, el esfuerzo y la soledad de gran parte de la campiña uruguaya. Los árboles retratados crecen delante o detrás de chircas de piedra, construidas como límites de piquetes o de potreros para retener el ganado o dejarlo afuera. Las piedras, que pueden haber sido extraídas de los mismos predios, ayer fueron el material de construcción que los campesinos tenían a mano, hoy son objetos sensuales y estéticos.

En el fondo, detrás de los árboles y de las pircas, el campo y el cielo se abren sin límites visibles. El artista nos presenta la contra cara del mundo urbano y del mundo en conflictos bélicos, inmersos en carencias tan vitales como la quietud y lo privado.

La mayoría de las fotos, tomadas con cámaras mecánicas de enfoque manual, fueron captadas en negativos de formato 6 x 6, y algunas en formato tradicional de 35 mm. En general eligió fotografiar con luz difusa y cuando trabajó con luz cenital el cielo se ve cruzado por algunas nubes, que dan a la escena un aire pictórico. El autor revela él mismo sus negativos en el laboratorio que ha instrumentado en la cocina de su casa.

“En silencio”iii

Aún cuando los trenes han dejado de ser uno de los medios de comunicación en uso relevantes en el Uruguay, éstos siguen teniendo una impronta afectiva en el espectador sensible. José Risso, consecuente en su búsqueda de los datos y elementos que conforman la historia visual del campo uruguayo, retoma un ensayo fotográfico sobre las viejas estaciones ferroviarias y su entorno.

“La idea surgió delante del mapa de Uruguay. Viendo tantos pueblos y parajes en los cuales el ferrocarril fue desmantelado como servicio de transporte, recordé las viejas estaciones que fotografié en el pasado – a veces vestigios de lo que fueron- y me di cuenta que debía registrar otras tantas. En definitiva, la fotografía fue la excusa para conocer pueblos y ciudades a los que aún no había llegado.”

Visitó varias veces las estaciones más cercanas a su casa para captar los cambios de luz según la hora. “En otros casos, después de recorrer más de cuatrocientos kilómetros, encontré apenas unas paredes sin techo y las vías cubiertas por el pasto y la vegetación”.

Durante sus recorridos, su mirada fue descubriendo el sentido estético de los tanques que surtieron de agua a las máquinas, de las vías al ras del suelo, de las ruedas y de los vagones abandonados. Estos elementos que fueron fundamentales al funcionamiento de los trenes, despojados de su objetivo, pasaron a ser temas abstractos de su lente.

Líneas y volúmenes en blanco y negro y en una amplia gama de grises, conforman una visión contemporánea del descarte industrial ferroviario. Y una vez más, como en las series anteriores, José Risso nos devuelve la historia misma en imágenes

“Perfilando el horizonte”iv

Perfilando el Horizonte / o la vocación por el paisaje

A Janet Henderson
con profunda empatía

Este trabajo de José Risso surge de su vocación profunda por el paisaje rural uruguayo. Paisaje que se define a través de sus árboles y arbustos nativos, en particular el ombú. Phytolacca dioica es su nombre científico. Ombú surge de una voz guaraní que significa sombra o bulto oscuro. Bellasombra, como también se lo llama, ha trascendido su destino botánico como elemento relevante en las pinturas de Pedro Figari y de Nicolás García Uriburu. José Risso lo retoma como un ícono trascendente de la campaña uruguaya.

Desde la botánica se discute la naturaleza del ombú: ¿es un árbol, un arbusto o una hierba gigante? Lo que no se discute son sus capacidades de sombra durante el día y de refugio de las inclemencias del tiempo. O que su tronco o tallo acumule grandes cantidades de agua que le permite sobrevivir en entornos de pocas lluvias. O que es inmune a la mayoría de los insectos.

El autor recorre kilómetros en auto en busca del paisaje que provoque su lente, se detiene,camina con su equipo a cuestas, estudia los temas concentrándose en la cualidad de la luz y en las texturas. No se apura. No enfoca por enfocar. Sabe lo que busca. Su mirada atenta analiza y determina el motivo y el momento: me ha pasado recorrer cuatrocientos kilómetros y no encontrar un motivo de esa serie (árboles) para fotografiar, escribe. Y agrega: Los ombúes, según la época del año van variando su aspecto, frondoso o desprovisto totalmente de hojas, a veces el mismo árbol fotografiado en diferentes estaciones, parece dos árboles distintos.

José Risso se ha mantenido al margen de innovaciones técnicas ajenas a la fotografía analógica tradicional. No se ha dejado llevar por fantasías digitales que empañen su visión telúrica y austera de la campaña uruguaya. Sus árboles en blanco y negro, en tomas estáticas bidimensionales, son imágenes silenciosas elocuentes, que revelan la pasión cuasi religiosa de su autor por el paisaje rural autóctono.

Notas

1. Galería del Paseo.
Octubre 2008
2. Fundación Pablo Atchugarry
30 de enero al 13 de febrero de 2009
3. Centro Cultural de España.
Setiembre de 2011
4. Museo Zorrilla
Noviembre de 2011

Sobre José Risso

Se inicia en la fotografía con Roberto Riverti, Panta Astiazarán y perfecciona su técnica de laboratorio en blanco y negro con Carlos Porro. Estudia en el Taller de Artes Plásticas Jones-Vicente, asiste a los cursos de historia del arte del Prof. Miguel Ángel Battegazzore y a las charlas sobre fotografía de Ferruccio Musitelli.  Algunas exposiciones individuales;  Museo Zorrilla de San Martín. Centro Cultural de España. La muestra titulada “El paisaje como punto de partida de la identidad” en la Fundación Pablo Atchugarry. En el año 2008 en la Galería del Paseo en Montevideo. Todas con la curaduría de Alina Tortosa.

Algunas exposiciones colectivas; en 2012 en el Centro de Exposiciones Subte en Montevideo (Archivo de El Monitor Plástico). Espacio Innova, Manantiales. En 2009 en la Galería del Paseo en el marco de Fotograma. En 2008 y 2007 en la casona del Arboretum Lussich en Punta Ballena.

Museo de Arte Precolombino e Indígena, Montevideo, en el año 2008.
En el año 2007 en Colonia en el  Bastión del Carmen. En el 2005 en el Atrio de la Intendencia Municipal de Montevideo, invitado en la muestra anual del Taller Aquelarre.

Sobre Alina Tortosa

Nació en Buenos Aires. Escritora, crítica de arte  y curadora independiente.
Columnista de arte del Buenos Aires Herald de 1998 a 2004 -   De 2005 a 2007 cátedras de Encuentro con el arte contemporáneo en inglés – 2007 Arte y Medios en la USAL: Universidad del Salvador –  Estudios: Cambridge Overseas Examinations: A Levels -  Historia del arte moderno, Estética  y crítica de la obra de arte con Jorge Lopez Anaya -   Diploma de Estudios Superiores de l’Alliance Française -   Nociones básicas de alemán y de latín -  Libros publicados de poesía: Las piedras bajo el agua,  Centro y Periferia, y Ritual doméstico.

Libros publicados de cuentos: Cuentos burgueses, El jardín de la abuelita Ana y otros cuentos y  La entrevista inédita y otros cuentos.   Novela: Los anteojos de Clara.  Escribió sobre arte contemporáneo en catálogos, en periódicos y en revistas especializada. Su artículo sobre Daniel Joglar forma parte de Vitamin 3D, New Perspectives in Sculpture and Installations, de Phaidon Press, 2009 . Traductora del y al inglés. Ha curado muestras en la Argentina, Uruguay, Brasil y en Ginebra, Suiza. Actualmente vive en Pan de Azúcar, Uruguay, donde sigue escribiendo poesía, una novela y está recopilando sus textos sobre los artistas argentinos contemporáneos que ha seguido a lo largo de sus carreras.

An art historian at her best: Andrea Giunta

Buenos Aires Herald. Sunday, March 14, 2004

An art historian at her best / The 1960s by Andrea Giunta

By Alina Tortosa

For the Herald

Andrea Giunta (1960, Buenos Aires) is a well known Argentine art historian with international predicament, who has gone into alleys and backwaters in her art history research and subsequent publication to understand and to explain the origin and development of events, as well as facing bluntly, in detail and intensively, the ever conflicting 1960s in the Argentine visual art panorama. 

Though through her previous work she had achieved academic status and considerable recognition, her book Vanguardia, internacionalismo y política / Arte argentino de los años sesenta, published in 2001, proved a turn of the screw in the manner in which vernacular art history is interpreted and analyzed, as Giunta went further than the mostly parochial and listy account of developments that passed locally for art history before.  Her cross national and international interdisciplinary analysis of the way events took place opened new vistas and provided new answers to questions that had been previously discussed perfunctorily.

The Herald interviewed her asking basic questions on her studies and vocation, as well as questions on wider issues.

When asked why she chose to study philosophy and art history, Giunta confessed that she has a very wide range of interests, so that she had a hard time deciding what profession to follow.  To begin with she read Science, as well as philosophy and literature, but because her family economic situation took a turn for the worse at the time she had to work as well as study, so that it became impossible for her to read two disciplines at the same time and she dropped Science. 

“Though my mother always backed my decision, my family had no relation to the art world, so that my “vocation” to them was an anomaly rather than a decision to celebrate. But it was this going into foreign territory that I found so fascinating”.

In the beginning she was seduced by the atmosphere at the University, rather than by the subject matter itself, and was interested in history at large, rather than in art history, which may well be the reason for her in-depth approach to art.

When asked how she felt about art history when she started studying it, she answered it was awfully boring. “It was more a question of memorizing biographies and comparative chronologies, of knowing where the works of art were and who they were attributed to.  Thinking art history was not a challenge, it meant following the evolution of different styles. This changed when I started studying medieval art with Francisco Corti, Ofelia Manzi and, of course, with Nilda Guglielmi”. 

Giunta explained that though the physical characteristics of Romantic and Gothic architecture were still an issue, the bibliography was more complex and art was an enigma to be solved rather than a passive object to be described and classified. This was particularly so with Héctor Schenone on Colonial Art and with Catalina Lago on European art in the XIX c.

Outside these courses art history at the University was mostly a list of names, rereading old notes and looking at the same slides again and again with the head of the chair repeating the same comment on them year after year.

“I was keen on working out a hypothesis from an image as I saw it grow and develop during the class.  I did not see a painting as an object to decorate a wall, but as a surface crossed by history, by projects that had been carried through and by others that had not reached completion, by arguments, tensions and loves, by diverse aesthetic programs that planned and dreamt of a different and better world”.

When asked how Argentine art history was envisaged then within a world context, and how it stood within a Latin American context, Giunta explained that Argentine art history at the time was taught from 1870, the year Prilidiano Pueyrredón died.  Prehispanic art and contemporary Latin American art were ignored. It was enough to learn about the European avant- gardes of the XX c and how any Argentine artistic efforts applied to these movements. 

“My problem was to understand Argentine art outside the regional and international stereotypes, to grasp that each artistic production implied an analysis starting with specific instruments and not with a quest for an “Argentine”, a “Latin American” or an “international” identity”.

With regards to contemporary art, Giunta explains that it cannot be analyzed on the same terms as XIX c and XX c art.  The diversity of materials, the breaking away from traditional art languages, the different media, the fact that an artist is no longer a painter, a sculptor or a printer, that he/she may work within these disciplines but may also work with video, photography and installations has broken away with the modernist tradition. This contamination of different languages, the traveling around the Biennial circuits, foreign in-residence programs, grants and the wide circulation of information makes it even more difficult to speak of “Argentine” or of “Latin American” art.

When the Herald referred to her book on the 1960s, the art historian agreed that it is a-turn-about from previous Argentine art history in which events used to be tidily ranged by decades. Though her book deals with the 1960s, Giunta traced events back to 1944 and ended the book in 1968.  It is not a list of names of the artists who worked during that period but an analysis of the way events originated and interrelated, taking into account the major preoccupations of that time: the avant-garde, the relationship between art and politics and/or the desire to lead Argentine art into the international art arena.

Giunta ‘s flair for research and reflection led her to work within art history much in the way modern and contemporary historians at large and literature historians had previously worked in their fields.  The interrelation between social history and art history widened her vision and allowed her to describe a multidisciplinary scene, in which characters and events were not isolated items on a stage but logical developments of specific circumstances.

There is no question that for professor Giunta her work has become a philosophical quest.  “My dream”, she wrote to the Herald, “is for art to be more than an object to be exhibited, sold or bought, but to be enjoyed and thought about.  It ought to be the subject of debates, to question the sense of a work of art is sound proof of its depth, of the strength of its power to communicate, of its complexity”.

Poetic alchimia: Victor Grippo

Buenos Aires Herald. Sunday, July 4, 2004

Poetic alchimia /  Or the work by Victor Grippo

By Alina Tortosa

For the Herald

Energy as the key to life and creativeness, energy as the means to material and intellectual survival, is the backbone and the key to the work by Victor Grippo.  Grippo / Una retrospectiva. Obras 1971 – 2001, a partial retrospective of the work by this artist, that opened last week at the Malba – the Buenos Aires  Latin American Art Museum- illustrates for the visitor this criteria.

His work was exhibited and admired world wide as one of the valuable contributions to XX c. thinking and aesthetics.  A quiet, modest man, who was sure of himself, not to be deviated or deterred from what he thought best and from what he wanted to do, and who, at the same time, was surprised to draw to himself the attention and admiration he drew.  This combination of unworldliness and strength, nurtured by knowledge and erudition, places him among one of the most interesting minds we have come across in the art world

He studied painting and sculpture in Junín, province of Buenos Aires, where he was born in 1936 of Italian immigrant parents.  The atmosphere in his own home and of his native provincial town provided the feedback and support he needed to develop his intellectual and creative capacities. His father, a builder, introduced him as a child to moulding through plaster, an element he would use often in his work, and his mother and his sisters, who drew for pleasure, introduced him to drawing. 

 At the age of 17 he moved to La Plata to study Chemistry and Design at the La Plata National University.  A deep understanding of the essential values of these two disciplines  laid the foundations for his work as an artist:  a sense of purpose and a sense of economy, a feeling for the spare, run through the body of his work.

After an exhibition of his paintings at the Lirolay gallery in 1966, Grippo realized he wanted to go beyond paint on canvas to refer to basic human needs, such as work and survival. This took him to look for other materials and to a different way of showing his work.  His scientific experience led him to explore the link between science and art.  He thought of potatoes when looking for a medium easily found in daily life in large quantities  that would represent energy and the transmission of energy. He also found in simple, well used domestic tables, or in tables used for the different crafts, a medium and support for his aesthetic essays on labour. 

Potatoes and tables, the modest media that have become the clue to his work as we know it, again and again rightly described as conceptual, are also emotional choices that refer to his early home life.

Through his Analogies of the 1970s, beautifully installed in the current exhibition at the Malba,  Grippo proved that potatoes, if wired with zinc and copper electrodes, transmit electric energy.  

The tables in the show are the support and context for the tools and elements used in manual professions, they are sensual and poetic installation that suggest rather than illustrate a way of life.  Tables are also the surfaces on which words are written, words as the sustaining substance that burrows into our consciousness and irrigates our gestures  and our beliefs.

Life-Death-Resurrection  (1980) has been impeccably reproduced as the sense of this piece relates to a biological development that must take place during the show.  Beautiful geometric metal figures  were again filled with hidden wet beans.  The beans ferment  and grow eventually into plants that will break through the neat metal structure. A wonderful metaphor: art, design, craftsmanship are means to an end but life itself is the mediator. This work is an article of faith on the inevitability of evolution, on the beauty and the joy of creation through a process that goes from the whole to the decadent to growth.

Because of his knowledge of chemistry and because of his strong metaphysical and poetical leanings, Grippo chose to address the composition of his work and to address the equilibrium between basic needs and aesthetics, between the material and the spiritual, the ordinary and the extraordinary through  alchemy to transform the nature of matter.  Alchemy is the non scientific predecessor of chemistry.  It was held in great respect in the Middle Ages as one of the means to transform base metals into gold, to discover a life-prolonging elixir, a universal cure for disease and a universal solvent.

This conception of alchemy implies that the material elements that go into the making of a work of art are transformed, through the mediation of the artist, into a presence imbued with sacramental value beyond its components.  This criterion of his gives us an inkling of the deep respect in which he held his own work.

A comprehensive catalogue has been published for the occasion with introductions by Eduardo F. Costantini, president of the Costantini Foundation and by Marcelo Pacheco, curator in chief, with texts by Ana Longoni and Adriana Lauría,  Argentine art historians, by Lilian Llanes, Cuban curator, who showed Grippo’s work in the Fifth La Havana Biennial in 1994, by Guy Brett, English art historian, on the artist’s visit to England in 1996, when he went with his wife, Nidia Olmos, to prepare for the show the following year at the St Ives Tate, by Angeline Scherf, French curator, Director of the Musée de Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and by Justo Pastor Mellado, Chilean curator.  There is an extensive and well documented reproduction of works by the artist and photographs. The bibliography includes texts by the artist, texts by third parties and press articles.  The texts and information on the work are translated into English.

(Grippo / Una retrospectiva. Obras 1971 – 2001, Malba / Colección Constantini, Figueroa Alcorta Avenue 3415. Until September 6).

A new insight into Marcela Astorga’s work

Buenos Aires Herald. Sunday, November 17, 2002.

A new insight into Marcela Astorga’s work

Leather as inroads into religious and spiritual territory

By Alina Tortosa

For the Herald

The latest work by Marcela Astorga (1965, Mendoza), currently on show at Luisa Pedrouzo’s, has moved miles away from previous political statements into a sensual and religious territory that broadens the aesthetic and spiritual scope of her proposals.  The author, who was awarded the 2001 Subsidio a la Creación Artística de la Fundación Antorchas (Artistic Creation Antorchas Foundation Grant) to develop the project for this show, is at ease with what she had achieved. As well she should be. 

Cuestión de piel, as the exhibition is called, refers to the material the work is made of: cow hides, as well as to questions of empathy and antipathy.  The literal English translation of this expression  would be “A matter of skin”, meaning our feelings for somebody are dictated by a physical perception of his or her presence. The skin as sensor,  as a receptive organ.  Also, the skin as the apparent measure of who we are and where we come from, as it is part of the inheritance we received from our ancestors. 

As Astorga worked the last pieces for this show, she realized that she was coming to terms with her family history, through stories told by her mother.  These stories dealt with her mother’s father, a German Jew, and his lovable and distinct character.  Once we understand this and her deep feelings of belonging to the religious and secular cultures she inherited, this exhibition reads as a celebration and a strong personal assessment.  Each piece has a distinct meaning and is conceptually different than anything she has done before.

An elegant wooden chair, the seat of which has fallen through into long narrow leather straps that trail behind it and around it, confronts the viewer with a cabbalistic riddle: what is the use of a chair without a seat?  Or what is the purpose of an art piece that looks like a chair on which you cannot sit down? Or why do the straps fall through and trail behind the chair as if they were long strands of hair?  What does it all mean? 

Lashebet in Hebrew means to sit down, and from this word stems yeshiva: a seminary where orthodox Jews study the Talmud, the primary source of Jewish law.  It is well known that orthodox religious male Jews sit for hours studying and discussing long standing and new references and counter references of each Talmudic law. The Hasidim, who emphasize the emotional relationship with God, are taught through apparently arbitrary riddles, rather than through pragmatic thinking, to provoke intellectual somersaults that will allow them to achieve enlightment.  So, if we follow this train of thought, Astorga’s chair is an art piece that poses questions to which we do not know the answers, and therefore becomes a riddle as well as an object of devotion that stands for a long quest of the truth.

Another very impressive work, in which the straps buckled to each other cascade from high up on the wall to the floor into overlapping and intertwining arabesques, may be read as a head of the longest hair, symbol of strength and superior physical and intellectual energy.  Or one can read the falling straps as parchment scrolls on which the Torah is written, this Torah that is the occasion of so many hair splitting discussions.

A dish, full to the brim with thin spaghetti-like hairy pieces of leather, on a shelf against a wall at the very back of the gallery, is obviously unpalatable. Or a rich dish that may be bring about dire moral consequences, as the traditional lentils that lost Esau his father’s blessing.

Driving down the country side, the artist was impressed by those rolls of hay lying in the fields to provide food for the cattle in Winter.  Inspired by their beauty, she reproduced

one in cow  hides treated as parchment.  The large, thick roll of parchment is a beautiful art object in itself, but one cannot avoid the strong references to the importance of food as nourishment to survive.  As well as the fact that the parchment quality of the piece introduces the importance of written texts, particularly the scriptures, which are food for thought and provide the intellectual energy that allows people to endure intense suffering and stress.

Though these preoccupations may strike imminent contemporary issues, they are also timeless, linking the past with the present and the present with the future.  Physical and intellectual hunger and the means to nourish them are everlasting conditions and pursuits.

The short passage lined by black bristle brush material is a homage to her maternal grandfather,  a German Jew, who made brushes. It is a sensual installation that, to the artist, became a rite of passage from her ordinary immediate life into the rich cultures she inherited from both her families. 

The layout of the exhibition is careful and spacious, allowing  plenty of room for every piece.  It is a good show to analyse the creative process of an honest artist. An artist who is not out to design something to please the media or the collector, but who is following her own internal project.  She allows her thoughts and feelings to stretch and stress the elements she works with, often before she actually understands what she is doing.  The neutral white gallery space and the understated elegance of the pieces add to their profound and rich connotations.  This exhibition affords a mystical insight into Astorga’s work that was not apparent before.

A show not to be missed.

(Marcela Astorga, Cuestión de piel, Luisa Pedrouzo, Arenales 834. Until November 30).