The MCMC gallery is pleased to announce the individual exhibition of Ary Brizzi, entitled Visual Thinking with the curatorship of María José Herrera.

For those who chose a background in drawing and decorative painting, the case of Ary Brizzi, geometry was never a mere “ornament” but a reason for study for the composition and correct historical interpretation of the subject to be illustrated. His student notebooks with expressive sketches, detailed plates with drawings of capitals, friezes and architectures show how early he became familiar with the codes of a non-naturalistic image. The concept of painting as a “unique fact”, that is to say autonomous, independent of representation, had been proposed by the specific avant-gardes of the 1920s and 1940s. With these premises well understood and ready to expand them, a third generation of geometric – Among which is Brizzi-, the neo-concretes, he pointed out new directions: those of light and movement.

Once received at the High School, Brizzi took six years to study everything he felt the school had not given him. The intuition that geometric art would be its mature form of expression led the artist to form through reading with those authors and teachers who theorized about the beginnings of abstraction in the twentieth century. Between 1952 and 1957, Brizzi carried out daily studies, in which he put into practice all the conceptual baggage of the different trends in geometry and constructivism that he had analyzed. Shocked by Max Bill’s visual developments, he continued his trend towards an art that, as defined by the Swiss artist, is governed by mathematics, “one of the most efficient means for the knowledge of objective reality [and] at the same time , science of relationships, of behavior from thing to thing, from group to group, from movement to movement. And since mathematics contains these fundamental principles and relates them to each other, it is natural that such events can be presented, this is transformed into visual reality ”.

Indeed, the concepts of “visual reality” and “plastic reality” were supported by Brizzi, who did not speak of geometry or abstraction but of “concrete forms”, as the Bauhaus constructivists called them. The concrete form does not depend on mimesis or allegories. Thus, his color and composition studies based on the laws of vision develop a vast repertoire of forms created through the application of the seriation method. That is, each exercise that belongs to a thematic series has color or position variations of its elements until it shows that condition that contemporary physics spoke of: matter is energy and space its infinite field of action. Attractions and repulsions, colors that advance or recede, and time as a necessary participant in these movements were some of the pictorial themes where art and science met once again.

Many of the cardboard tempera presented today were never exhibited. We know some of them because from being sketches they became paintings. Others because they appealed to us from the exquisite graphics of various products of the industry and culture of the time. But most of them are unpublished. Jealously preserved by the artist, its quality of completion and the date with day, month and year tells us that more than sketches they are the evidence of a true “visual thinking” that Brizzi sought to retain to understand the logic of his creativity, as well as to use it as a “in reserve” repertoire.

“Art is the force and the unrepeatable beauty of transformed matter,” wrote Brizzi, and he devoted himself to this task for more than sixty years, vibrating, transforming, lines, lights and colors before our own eyes.

María José Herrera

MCMC Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Norberto Gómez: 1967 – 2016, curated by Florencia Chernajovsky. Norberto Gómez (1941) studied at “Manuel Belgrano” School of Fine Arts in 1954 and attended the workshops of Castagnino and Berni. In 1965 he traveled to Paris, where he worked with Julio Le Parc. A year later he returned to Buenos Aires and began a series of geometric objects that explored the relationship of forms with space, ascribing to the gui­delines of American minimalism. In 1976 he develops a body of works that oscillate between the geometric and melted objects, using wood and metallic paint.

By 1977, he moved away completely from geometry and began to explore the possibilities and limits of polyester. These sculptures in resin, which take the form of viscera and human organs, are strongly traversed by the atrocities that occurred during the military dictatorship in Buenos Aires y the 70s. In 1984 begins a series of polyester works that address issues around power and oppression; in 1990 he exhibited at Ruth Benzacar gallery, mutilated human figures, mixed with animals and architectural fragments, with a parody tone and full of humor. In 1995 the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires made a retrospective of his work and in 1999 he was invited to be part of the Memory Park in Buenos Aires, where he presented the monumental sculpture Torres de la Memoria. In the first decade of 2000 he works on a series of bronzes that question the his­tory and the monument with great irony; in 2002 he received the Konex Prize. In 2011, the Osde Foundation made a retrospective exhibition of his works and in 2016 the National Museum of Fine Arts made an individual exhibition with geometric works made between 2014 and 2016.

Norberto Gómez: 1967-2016 explores different facets of the work of an intrinsically versatile ar­tist. A main figure in the history of Argentine art, Gómez slid through various movements and languages over the course of half a century, finding small interstices of full and sovereign free­dom of expression. The exhibition shows works that are linked to the Minimalist movement of the 60s, as well as the Pop art influence in his soft geometries.

The exhibition also includes works made in the 70s that refer to the Argentine political context, as well as the bronze pieces made in the 2000s that show the artist’s disruptive humor. These pieces will coexist with unpublished drawings of the 70s that express his skill as a lyricist, a pro­fession that Norberto Gómez exercises for more than twenty years, which allows him to develop an acute sensitivity of space, distances and forms.

Contrast and leaks brings together a selection of paper works by argentine artist César Paternosto. The works show the continuous need of the artist to evolve towards new plastic solutions, without losing the singular and reductivist sense of the structure and taking into account the pictorical sensual dimension, that characterizes his work so much.

This exhibition is close, as few, to the visual poetics through a set of constructions and geome­tric deconstructions created recently in acrylic on folded paper, which silently account for the careful manipulation of the material and the mastery in the austere use of color, of long tradi­tion in the works of the artist. They are refined and very simple compositions, with an unusual coherence. The exhibition is completed with small and colorful historical paper works, dated from the mid-sixties.

The works also remind us of the atonal musical compositions, a discipline closely related to Paternosto’s artistic production, in which the silences between some notes and others burst at different times in the phrases of the scores. In this way, they continue to question the habit of frontality in traditional reading in favor of an integral mode of observation.

We are in front of a sophisticated work that tells a story rooted in the history of our continent, since from an early age, Paternosto joined a stream of aesthetic research that, from Joaquín Torres-García’s geometry, unified the concepts of Avant-garde Art and Indoamerican tradition uniting, therefore, modernity and roots, as well as future and identity. This has been one of the central themes in his work.

The Abstraction as meaning has been the axis of Paternosto’s work, which implies, as the artist himself has said and written, a great stubbornness on his part. The ongoing effort of the autor to achieve the core of his expectations has taken him to divest himself of everything that did not bear a close relation to his intense search for meaning. In his works there is a slight sense of austerity that predispose us to question our perception of the artistic fact, highlighting in turn, the sophistication and genuine vocation of the artist.