Cerrar

Edgardo A. Vigo: In the center of the margin

MCMC is pleased to announce a solo exhibition from Edgardo Antonio Vigo (La Plata, Argenti­na, 1928-1997): conceptual artist, xylographer, engraver, critic and essayist.

Vigo is one of the greatest referents of conceptual art in Argentina, as well as of mail art and experimental poetry. He used to record and certified the existence of everything that was positioned outside the boundaries of art. He appealed to the social conscience and sometimes operated on langua­ge. He was an admirer of Marcel Duchamp, Macedonio Fernández, as well as of Lettrism and Fluxus.

Vigo used postal mail as his maximum vehicle of expression. He conceived Mail art as “commu­nication at distance”, which facilitated the active participation of the spectator. A circulation that rescued the vitality of a utopian and magical reality where collaboration was key, and the distance traveled that configured its structure was the work itself. In his countless critical inter­ventions he created useless objects, strange machines, poetry and woodcuts.

Among his numerous editorial works we can highlight the following: Diagonal Cero (1962-1969), a quarterly magazine dedicated to experimental poetry and Hexágono’71 (1971-1975), a maga­zine dedicated to experimental theory and poetry. Vigo understood the world as an organic whole in which there was no separation between knowledge, artistic practice and life. He believed fervently in the potential of art to mobilize the intellectual and emotional stillness of society and therefore sought, through his work, to esta­blish new ways of looking and acting in the world.

MCMC presents a small fragment from the large body of works preserved from this artist, who­se limits are not yet completely defined. The exhibition includes: pamphlets, Diagonal Cero (Diagonal Zero) and Hexagono’71 (Hexagon ’71) publications from 1962-1975, Mail art (conver­ted into concrete actions), visual poems, a series of actions called Señalamientos (signal work) from 1968, woodcuts, as well as unique museum quality pieces, such as Proletarian Chess.

Vigo’s works condense many stories: from the Di Tella Institute, as well as Buenos Aires’s under­ground and military dictatorship. Vigo’s production is unthinkable outside references to criti­cism, institutions, history, his colleagues and to his environment.

María Boneo – The luminous sound of forms

The luminous sound of the forms, is the solo exhibition of the argentinian sculptor María Boneo. The exhibition, curated by Ana María Battistozzi, brings together Boneo’s recent sculptures in colored resin and nickel-plated bronze that impose their resounding presence with their spatial alternations, polished surfaces and increasing scales.

Her works, which used to be figurative, keep the reminiscences of that past in the configuration of the abstract lines of the present. It is still possible to trace the memory of the female body in the meticulous program of depuration of forms.

From the wood carving of her beginnings, to the marble carving, whose reflections suggested many of the works exhibited in this exhibition, the artist reoriented her perception and body. She ponders the quality and the response of the materiality, as well as the incidence of light to define the form. A process that seems to be simple, but is far from it. 

María Boneo has repeatedly mentioned the “nest” form as a significant feature in her work. If the images of the world are not –as Jean Grondin points out– simple duplications of reality and that they correspond to interpretations that are implicit in our relationship with the world, it is interesting to explore the meaning of this form in the exhibition. It may be possible to think the internal movement of Boneo’s works as a vortex, as a pole of energy that in its rotation inevitably attracts bodies towards their center. A kind of whirlpool that draws all life force to a center from which it is not possible to escape.  In defiant contradiction with the impulse of current art that insists on considering beauty of forms with a certain disdain, María Boneo is committed to it. She affirms the unavoidable presence of forms that, as it is possible to notice in this exhibition, gravitate in space from a growing, increasingly daring scale.