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

Emptiness expansion is the individual show of Azul Caverna. The text that accompanied the exhibition was in charge of Florencia Qualina.

The huge painting has a disturbing name, something blasphemous: Chicken or Nietszche?. On the white background of the canvas three stripes are distributed composed of small rectangles that cross the surface diagonally. Two stripes are relatively short, their rectangles are yellow and pink; the other strip, more extensive, is composed of black figures. The repetition turns them into a system, they are no longer geometric structures and they begin to be characters. The characters move between the paintings like a swarm of bees. At first sight it is more evident to establish relations between the work of Azul Caverna with Concrete Art, than with the man of philosophy with hammers. Concrete Art is, for A.C, a primary source. You only need look at the works of Lidy Prati or Tomás Maldonado to see in him, a certain continuation in the iconographic plane. Other perceptions, relationships or readings, are somewhat more elusive and require the persistent attention of whoever meets them.

The images of Azul Caverna have, at some point, an unstable bias. In the serial characters, repeated without stop, you can read zebra’s steps, bar codes suspended in the desert. The conceptual axis of this exhibition is the emptiness. Said in his words: “The emptiness as a cold still mass, this eternal bubble seems to contain us and distance us enough from each other, as if protecting us from something, or better, as if protecting others from ourselves.” In a cryptic way, the rectangles transpose for A.C a herd that circulates between virtual networks. A swarm report led by common sense and publicity.

These ideas and impressions are not, however, the closing of the works. There will be, from this exhibition other multiple, contradictory, never misguided ideas and impressions around, about the works. The emptiness can be read as a Taoist emanation:

The space between heaven and earth is like a bellows, exhales empty endlessly.

The more you move, the more you exhale.

More is talked about him

and less is reached.

Or as a space arranged for contemplation, where there is nothing to understand or explain. This last possibility is the one I strongly suggest.

A circle, a game brings together a selection of paintings, papers and acrylic sculptures by the consecrated and prolific argentinean artist Rogelio Polesello.

Polesello takes place into the world of geometric art at an early age, as early as 1959 he had made his first individual exhibition at the Peuser gallery. Then he is part of the legendary generation of artists who passed through the mythical Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires in the sixties and who, being young, had already achieved great international recognition.

The set of exhibited works, dating from the sixties to the last years of production, show his authentic journey within geometric and optical abstract art in Argentina. Crossed by the games of vision, Polesello, defies the gaze with the deformation and succession of synthetic forms.

A circle, a game, reveals Polesello’s innate ability to use unpublished materials and techniques, evident in the works present at the exhibition. Among them: acrylic plates from 1969 – 1971, a set of works on paper from 1959; and paintings of the sixties and seventies.

The show puts the viewer in the center of the board to continue with the game and put in check his perception of reality.

Monochromes II: micro-stories, is a group exhibition of Marcelo Boullosa, Adriana Cimino Torres, Eduardo Costa, César Paternosto and Horacio Zabala. Curated by María José Herrera, is presented as the continuation of Monochromes exhibition at the Recoleta Cultural Center in 2010. This exhibition aims to recognize, ten years later, other possible stories in the “monochrome spectrum”, a type of artistic object that is defined more by the reductive character than by the use of a single color.

As Herrera referred in 2010, “the monochrome is resignified within contemporary art, filtering through the interstices of the international and local tradition, developing a reviewing art concepts and perception established by avant-garde movements. The current monochromes can refer to themes and narratives that modernist orthodoxy would have called spurious.

Among the works present in the exhibition are paintings, drawings, engravings and sculptures of artists of two generations that pay tribute to the expression “less is more”, but do not get satisfied only with that.

Growing in parallel with the field of modern Latin American art, with a greater international presence, MCMC emphasizes the expansion of the aesthetic knowledge of Argentine art, providing a careful approach to the important legacy of the artists it represents.

Monocromes II: micro-stories

Monochromes or bichromes, it seems that it is the color that defines these objects. However, it is not so. It is the reductive spirit, the will to bring to the minimum expression some of the characteristics that define the plastic phenomenon, either color, matter, composition, meaning, the common element of this set. In this sense, the monochrome has a vast Argentine tradition that connects it with the Invention Concrete Art, the Madí, the Perceptism, the Neoconstructivism of the 40s and its counterpart, the informalism. Both trends generated works of distinctive local identity.

 Contemplation of the void, delight for the texture, for the brief gesture of a line, astonishment for the matter that exposes itself, or for the fictions of the representation, the micro-story that implies a contemporary monochrome  -no matter how brief it is- turns on itself. Play with the limits of genres and disciplines. The monochrome points outs the edges, the conceptual or physical margins, as a scope ofresignification. Towards there it leads our gaze so that it pokes bewildered or fascinated, in the beauty of the idea.

María José Herrera

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.

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.  

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.