MC Gallery is pleased to present a solo project by one of Argentina’s greatest abstract artists, Víctor Magariños D. (1924-1993).
When we stand in front of Magariños’ works, we feel the presence of a unity, a symmetric fold, the power of the world’s beauty, the calmness before the force of the universe. The energy of each exhibited piece is a continuity without interruptions, an underlying movement in which the artist covers the entire surface of the piece. There are no beginnings or ends—it is always a point together with its implosions and explosions. It’s an enumeration of words that holds the secrets of different techniques that make up and fill the materiality of the universe and that is ruled by the atoms and their vibrations.
Victor Magariños D. steps into the Argentinian art scene in 1946, when concrete and non-figurative groups from the River Plate region are booming. Magariños created his own neo-criolla variant: he invented shapes within a system that had been established based on the structures related to perception and construction featured by international concrete art.
His earlier works from the 50s, a set of tempera paintings, place Magariños wandering around several forms of non-figurative art, in proximity to different international practices. We can see the variations of color planes in undulated, oblique, vertical, horizontal and diagonal exact shapes, dangerously put together; the movements in curved curves; folded rolls of the same color that come out of the background determined by the surfaces and become entwined in successive curves or, especially, in long and clear planes according to their firm geometric properties, with the tempera paint blurring the lines of the subjective.
By the 60s, he had begun his cosmogonies, a series of continuous drawings made with fiber, ink, plaster and glue on paper. These works are combined microspaces and macroshapes that spread out thanks to their divisions and juxtapositions between the different qualities that exist in reality: form, shape, flat relief, surface and spiral. His cosmologies from the 60s onwards show his transformation into a contemporary artist: his works on paper, canvas and white sheets belong to the newly inaugurated field of contemporary art—that explains the power of his creations and his vocabulary.
The artist’s creations are inventions of energy that never stop vibrating together in their supplements on the intervened support: colors, rhythms, arabesques, symbols, crossings, flags, constructive furniture, scaffolding planks, masts, threads, echoes, orography, bows, weavings, crosses, the open heart of possible roses or invisible peonies, the atom with its photons and electrons, fractured or endless lines.
The relationship between art and science is key in Magariños’ work. The artist considered the advances in physics to be signs of a new understanding of the cosmos that would bring a different social order and a new man. He was profoundly influenced by the two parts of Einstein’s theory of relativity, which established new properties of how matter worked and how the universe was structured.
The white vastness of his large scale paintings gave Magariños the clarity of a space that was always active, an unlimited fraction of the universe that had been cut out to observe the dynamics of matter as curved lines with subdivisions that worked in gravitational fields. The use of white on the entire canvas—including the sides— allowed for a perceptual experience of the image that became complete with the presence of the viewer. The addition of the viewer as they observed intervals, paths and dynamics led Magariños to the addition of time. The system was part of a structure that took place in time, observed by a viewer that moved in front of the work. Therefore, matter ended up being determined by the relative position of the viewer. He would present us with four-dimensional universes, made up of pictorial and physical variables, as well as those related to the behavior of matter, energy, curvature, and the viewer.
Since observing a painting is not just a perceptual experience, sooner or later we start to think and pose questions. And then, Víctor Magariños D. opens his codes to us—it does not really matter that he got them from nuclear physics—and the impact of his frame arts stimulate the expansion of consciousness. The paths are diverse, the meanings are multiple, each signifier and signified glides with total autonomy, but we find in the pictorial narration the emotional, aesthetic, and enlightening pathways to navigate through his white spaces, discover a world that is of another world and stay there—and return as many times as the keen contemporary observer wants to or needs to.
Bringing together a careful selection of works, ranging from the 1950s to the 1980s, MC Gallery invites you to discover the complex and stimulating visual language of this artist, which shows the virtues of vision and perception and the endless possibilities of the universe, emphasizing its highest splendors with mystery and playfulness.
