Category: Home Slider EN
Hotel de Paso, Oscar Bony
Orientation is a Transit Hotel
Santiago Villanueva
*
Orientation is one of the words that best guides me through the various moments of Oscar Bony’s work (1941-2002). It involves tilting to one side and then the other, akin to the sensation at the start of a fall and, instantly, regaining stability. This sense of flirtation, of insinuating oneself, of presenting without development, was a commentary for each moment: tendency is the most contradictory place to inhabit, but also the one suited to a voice that can be intensified. Bony saw minimalism, conceptualism, painting, and photography in this way. For each moment, avant-garde also meant evading the idea of a personal style.
*
Bony spoke about discontinuity in his work, of a fragment of discontinuity. He salvaged the possibility of not choosing, of remaining in a state of doubt, of not advancing, of proposing and stopping. In this sense, his production leaned towards a passive idea of avant-garde, where reaching the point of intensity and concept was simultaneously the moment to abandon: to sink in many directions at once. He said that this same sensation was what Buenos Aires produced in him: a Spanish house, a French building, one from the 50s modernism, a postmodern one. He defined it as a jumble. He likely took something from Luis Felipe Noé’s concept of “chaos.” “I was a romantic fool who thought he was in Fontainebleau. The photos I show really move me; that helpless, skinny, angry boy is Bony,” he says in an interview with Julio Sanchez in 1993. His words contrast with the certainty of his work’s development in the late 80s and 90s. The precision of the shots, the objective conceptualization in some of his appearances, contrasts with the return to an idealized and romanticized image of the artist, embracing and thinking around death and, above all, suicide.
*
When Marcelo Pacheco began his text for Bony’s exhibition catalog at Malba, he said: “I try to orient myself.” It seems like a beginning from the haze of never reaching a conclusion or a clear hypothesis, a certainty that identifies an extensive body of work spanning several decades, as a whole or a coherence. I would like to consider here, in the same vein, his work as an incoherent ensemble, which also leads me to affirm avant-garde as disappointment. I also think that the ability to orient oneself and disorient oneself was in Bony a possibility to invent a method. The works from the last years of his life allow me to reveal something of this method and rethink his work from previous decades.
Orientation can sometimes mean arriving at a concrete material, a word, or simply a repeated action. In Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006), Sara Ahmed asks: “What does it mean to be oriented? How do we begin to know or feel where we are, or even where we are going, aligning ourselves with the characteristics of the territories we inhabit, the sky around us, or the imaginary lines that traverse maps? How do we know which way to turn to reach our destination?” These are all questions organic to Bony, from the geographical coordinates of a sky to the intention of finding an objective sense to his practice under the necessity of allowing new beginnings. Ahmed talks about the familiar as a way of feeling space and how it imprints on bodies. Bony had worked on this sense in some of his 60s projects, approaches between conceptualism and minimalism, but always focused on understanding a space. The familiar is the configuration of the effect of experience, which measures the reach and contact with objects. Approaching is a way of reorienting the familiar. Ahmed also speaks of migration as a process of disorientation and reorientation, something that could extend beyond Bony’s work to the movements or displacements between the different cities he lived in or visited, emphasizing the idea of travel as a permanent state in the formation and opening of an artist. This displacement of bodies coming and going determines ways of inhabiting and thinking about spaces. Movement or migration is the sensation of what is unstable, and in that sense, Bony’s work could be considered, beyond geographic location, as a migratory practice. Ahmed refers to that space that falls: “When something is out of alignment, it is not just that the thing seems oblique, but that the world itself may seem tilted, which disorients the image and even displaces the body.” In a 1984 work, Bony had already tilted the plane of a painted sky, which from the lower right corner was attached by a thread to a small boat. He did the same in a series of works from 1992 and 1993, titled Memory Series, where the uses of photography appear through enlargement, manipulation, and staging with another series of objects. For Bony, photography was always the space of greatest security for disorientation, for losing oneself. Orientation is a transit hotel. Bony viewed artistic practice as a transit hotel and the artist as a “visitor-artist,” where there is no sense of belonging.
*
The short film Submarino Amarillo, which Bony filmed in 1965, evokes something of the dizziness inherent in being disoriented. A group of young people, including Pablo Suárez, Roberto Jacoby, and his little cousin, run naked along the beaches of Villa Gesell without an apparent destination, merely as a simple game among their bodies that evokes carefree behavior and adolescent eroticism. Nature reappears in many images of Bony’s work: in his well-known skies from the 70s, but also in works like Still Life (1996) and The Spiderweb (c. 1998), where shots are made on photographs of landscapes, possibly from Corrientes or Misiones. The image of the spiderweb appears, which can be thought of not only for this image but for all the Suicides and Executions. Contemplation of Absence 3 (1997) presents again a beach landscape, where the silhouettes of three people appear. Bony intervenes in the image with perforations with velvet backgrounds, creating a zigzagging line across the sky, confirming his hypothesis that Lucio Fontana’s slashes should have been horizontal, like the line of the Pampas horizon. Bony’s work is filled with punctuation marks constantly reconfiguring the image, annoying it and making it more receptive.
*
In 1959, Franco Di Segni, an artist and disciple of Enrique Pichon-Rivière, published a very particular book for thinking about the relationship between psychoanalytic culture and the analysis of a work of art. In Death and Destruction of a Sammer Makarius Painting, Di Segni intervenes the canvas from the perspective of analytical pressure, from the insistence on turning it around, looking again: ruining it with the eyes. I think of this book, this method, to look again at Bony. Interpretation, awareness, the construction of a coherence network is what traverses a gesture; not the shot, not the perforation, not the dot. Di Segni proposed to a group of people to meet periodically to find other possible interpretations in a Makarius canvas that would detach it from aspects related to the tradition and code of art history. The insistence on the image allowed approaching the same place with different words, where collective experience took a different form over time. The aim was to try out a vocabulary that projects a perforation and traverses the commonplace where the work might remain.
A shot marks a distance between what the artist decides to do and what it can provoke. A distance between intention and mark. The “important” space in Bony’s shootings and suicides is the trajectory of the projectile. The edge is not the frame but the fact that works can be thought of from the inside out. The center of the image, where the bullet perforates, is the edge, and the limits of the work are its centers. In the plural, because they variably build the possibility of containing spatial, formal, economic, and class information. The missing part is that edge, the perforation. What disappears from the image is a point, which does not alter a possible reading, only impacts interpretations. Bony distracts us with the possible metaphorical readings that repetition produces when viewing his work; the literalness generates a pause, a break, to think of all possible strategies to escape it. The viewer who arrives at a personal reading is the one who forgets the action and effect to focus on the distance.
*
In a 1994 interview with Hernan Ameijeiras, Bony confesses that he was affected by the death of Liliana Maresca, which occurred that same year, despite not being very close friends or frequenting common spaces much. Bony photographed her funeral, which was like a performance, as a tribute. Maresca had died after being HIV-positive and facing a fragile state of health in the last years of her life. It was a year before Bony began creating his Suicides and Executions and the same year that Miguel Harte created the work Surface Aspirators: an aluminum sheet with a Formica surface around it, with about six holes from which small drops of polyester resin oozed. Harte’s perforations on aluminum coincide with Bony’s perforations on glass and photography, though the former’s imagery later focused on the hole as an entry and exit space, with a more sexual than violent tint, like small gloryholes of fantasies.
*
In 1996, Federico Klemm dedicated one of his episodes of El banquete telemático to the exhibition Fusilamientos y suicidios curated by Bony at his Foundation. Klemm, amidst hurried and interrupted descriptions, refers to the attire of the characters in the work La familia obrera from 1968: “All classes dress up as best they can for a social event, just as the working masses celebrated Perón or when they faced the Russian czar, and even more so to present themselves in public, which does not distort their social identity.” Klemm connects moments, focusing more on the surface of things, which is why he takes risks. Suddenly he says, “A weapon in the hands of a fool can turn them into a murderer, a weapon in the hands of an artist can produce a creative act.” He then looks at the camera, aims, and fires, breaking the lens and simulating the action of Bony himself. Once seated in the “private” lounge, Bony confesses that “one needs to feel like a child to do tremendous things,” reflecting on the idea of judgment and his works as a product of the times: “In a disintegrating society, in a century’s end coming too fast, it seems necessary to end the postmodern, to end the light, and to assert.” “Well, the light is almost over…” replies Klemm. “Fortunately,” concludes Bony. That same year, in the catalog of the Bienal del Mercosur, he referred to the impacts of his shots: “As it’s broken, so it remains.” Bony’s actions are precise, but also impossible to conceal; each shot is an indelible mark on the work.
A year later, in 1997, when he created La barrita de Quilmes and La familia del barrio, it seems he is aiming at his own working-class family. It is almost a repentance, a shooting at the very gesture of past decades, where the feelings of humiliation and abuse of power appear, as Pacheco points out. That year, the rooms of the Centro Cultural Recoleta inaugurated an exhibition that also, but in a different way, closed a decade full of dire consequences for our lives, which would become even more apparent in the years to come. It was Jorge Gumier Maier’s El tao del arte, opening as Bony completed this series of shootings that imprinted new meanings onto his previous work, like an ouroboros gradually stopping and abandoning its motion.
Las noches blancas
Artists: Roberto Aizenberg, Juan Battle Planas, Marcelo Canevari, Aída Carballo, Cynthia Cohen, Sandra Guascone, Misterio Tarot (Geraldine Lanteri y Aldo Benítez), Ornella Pocetti, Xul Solar, Osias Yanov y Rosario Zorraquin.
Curator: Lara Marmor
De noche el fuego nos ilumina (1971), Los límites del sueño (1970) y Quieto diálogo del insomnio (1968) by Juana Butler (1928-2017) lead us to a universe in which everything underlies, where the unconscious glimmers, revelations take place and the occult shines. Butler opens the doors of the surreal, mystical and ecstatic night.
On the surface of his paintings can be seen the active work of the thin layer of oil that simultaneously darkens and brightens the original pigments. Butler made use of the power of the mental emancipation of surrealism and also, when painting, he knew how to go through different states of consciousness from the alteration produced by the practice of meditation.
The works of the group of artists that today give life to Las noches blancas take us away from the limits of reason. Without psychic or moral repression, they bring us closer to the encounter with productions filled with enjoyment, dance, stimulation, multisensoriality and epiphanic discoveries that rise up at night. El llamado de la noche (2024) by Marcelo Canevari, together with Las edades (2024) by Ornella Pocetti, are timeless paintings, or instead they seem to have the indeterminate temporality of dreams. The meticulous contemplation of nature and also the collection of visual information from the Internet are some of the sources that give rise to these productions, where the shift between fiction and reality is brutal. In her works, the human figure is the main character, and in his, the landscape is usually the protagonist. The painting of both, indistinctly, condenses high doses of enchantment and mystery, enchantment and sensuality. At night for Cynthia Cohen, hallucinations are real. Vivac and Vivac #2 (2023) represent the moment when the artist participates in the opening of portals in northern Argentina. A few months later, near the Antarctic end of the Earth, in Chubut, Cohen picks up a bunch of stones. It is said that Quartz cleanses impurities and that Ruby represents the strength of passion. What could be the therapeutic quality of a black faceted stone that looks like a constellation? Sandra Guascone moves with fluidity between the fields of astronomy, chemistry and biology; between life and death; light and shadow; living and non-living matter. To materialize his drawings, like Cohen, she enters into a state of sensory openness in which he receives messages, allowing herself to be traversed by that elusive thing called energy. Thus her powerful and magnetic assemblages of insects, astral matter, vegetables and animals are born.
Between 2012 and 2021, Rosario Zorraquín made a series of drawings from which she created a new alphabet based on an automatic graph. These symbols were later carved in Braille to be perceived in sessions where the guests had to decode the signs with their impressions, while the painter, medium and explorer
of matter, translated them into new paintings. Osias Yanov’s artistic practice is also crossed by the creation or resignification of symbols, many of them taken from Xul Solar (recognized by Yanov as the first cuir artist producer of languages). Desire, esotericism and collective care are some of the keys to his artistic practice made up of objects, gatherings, parties and performances.
Corazón de madera (2022) and Mitominas (2023) are assemblages where autobiographical elements are related to historical ones and in which sexual toys coexist, resignified objects such as the spoon that, against the techno-heroic imaginary of the knife or the sword, is a tool that does not prick or cut, but contains and moves.
White nights are repeated at each summer solstice in the regions near the poles. They are clear and luminous. The twilights are eternal and in them the glow intertwines with the twilight. I imagine that the music accompanying this phenomenon is that of The Poem of Ecstasy, the composition by Aleksandr Scriabin (1872-1915) about which Henry Miller wrote: It has that distant cosmic itch. Divinely fouled. All fire and air. The first time I heard it I played it over and over again (…) It was like a bath of ice, cocaine and rainbows. For weeks I was in a trance. Something had happened to me (…) Every time a thought took hold of me, a little door opened inside my chest, and there, in this comfortable little nest, sat a bird, the sweetest and tamest bird imaginable. Our own white nights also have their own music. Misterio Tarot, the duo formed by Geraldine Lanteri and Aldo Benítez, made the sound design of the room based on the personal arcana of Juana Butler, Xul Solar, Juan Batlle Planas, Roberto Aizenberg and Aída Carballo. Perhaps the visible is overrated, suggest Lanteri & Benítez, who sought the syntonic tone of our southern nights to let in the invisible, other ways of being, opening the threshold to new senses.
A community of origin
Since the late 1960s, Nicolás García Uriburu and Luis Fernando Benedit, artists that MC Galería brings together in this exhibition, addressed with their works a concern for nature, bringing art and ecology together in a pioneering way, with the intervention or incorporation of natural elements in their productions. Their trajectories have a common origin: they met while studying architecture at the University of Buenos Aires, became friends and developed their artistic practice in a self-taught way parallel to their university education. Both took their first steps in the artistic field with painting at the beginning of the sixties, a decade marked by political ups and downs, by censorship, but also by radical ruptures in art. It is possible to find between them an affinity of thought that expanded, from a shared disciplinary root to an artistic exploration with new media and supports, alien until then to the field of art, to investigate in an ecological and ethological problem that will distinguish them from then on.
The word ecology, from the Greek Oekologie, has its root in the term Oikos, which refers to the house, the habitat, the environment where organisms develop. In this conception, the house cannot be reduced to a building construction, but encompasses a whole territory, its vegetation, the other beings that inhabit it and allow its existence. “This complex integrality is what the science of ecology is all about,” says biologist Marcela Castelo. This shift seems to have operated in both artists, from a concern for habitable spaces for human beings to a consideration of the planet as the common home of all species.
The environmental concern that can be found in their works has both a planetary imprint and a local root. Together they undertook, around 1961, a trip to Peru that was decisive in the development of a thinking committed to the cultural history of the Latin American continent, which was later manifested in their productions. In the case of Uriburu, it was expressed in his permanent defense of the continent as a natural reservoir of the planet, denouncing the depredation of the hegemonic powers. In both of them there persists a work with the rural imaginary and the tradition of the Argentine landscape, especially of the Pampean plains. In García Uriburu’s work this can be seen from his early paintings to his series dedicated to ombúes and bulls; in Benedit’s work it is revealed through references to Argentine history, to traveling painters or the painting of Florencio Molina Campos, as well as to the design of furniture with cow bones and hides. Marcelo Pacheco described the latter as the most criollo of Argentine artists, a category that, far from a stereotyped or universalist expression, manifests a force capable of “phagocytizing what is proper and what is foreign, what is learned and what is inherited, what is national and what is international”, a phagocytic force that can be traced in national essay writing, from Ezequiel Martinez de Estrada to Rodolfo Kusch, some of them frequented, at least theoretically, by Benedit.
With these concerns for the future of the planet, towards the end of the 1960s the works of both artists acquired international visibility, both for the material radicality of their proposals and for the conceptual development under the orbit of what Jack Burnham called “systems art”. This denomination, conceived by Burnham in an article published in September 1968 in Artforum magazine, soon had an impact on the local artistic field, particularly in the figure of Jorge Glusberg, who from the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) promoted the production of experimental works of a conceptual nature through this category. Benedit had an active participation in this center, being part of its board of directors and integrating the Group of Thirteen that emerged from it. Uriburu, installed abroad during those years, had a more peripheral participation, but he exhibited in many of its shows and his links with the center were fundamental for him to develop the coloring of the Río de la Plata in 1970, a process that had begun a few years earlier.
In 1968 he made his first coloring by pouring thirty kilos of flourescein, a harmless dye, over the Grand Canal of Venice, with which he dyed its waters green. In a Europe still convulsed by the recent events of the French May, which impacted in deep criticism towards the Venice Biennale about to inaugurate its 34th edition, Uriburu, in an anti-institutional gesture, intervened directly on the real space with an ephemeral action that exceeded the traditional practices of art. This action, which attracted the attention of the press and even caused him to be arrested by the police, marked a turning point in his career: he oriented his production towards the environmental issue and began a series of colorations that he carried out all over the world.
Meanwhile his fellow student, Benedit, traveled on a scholarship to Rome in 1967 to study landscape architecture with Francesco Fariello. Driven by the knowledge of botany and biology acquired there, and with the advice of ethologist José Núñez, he developed Biotrón, one of his most paradigmatic works, which he presented in 1970 at the XXXV Venice Biennale, just two years after García Uriburu’s first coloration in the same city. It consisted of a large aluminum and transparent Plexiglas structure with artificial plants inside, to be inhabited by four thousand bees, which could either collect pollen from the technological flowers or go outside. In addition to this work, Benedit presented Minibiotron, a transparent acrylic piece for insects or arachnids to inhabit, which allowed them to be observed closely through a magnifying glass. These habitable proposals for living beings, as well as the work Fitotrón, a closed environment for the hydroponic cultivation of plants that was exhibited in 1972 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, together with the labyrinths and circuits that he developed in those years, are based on his interest in the study of animal and plant behavior, as well as the express link between science and art, which puts into discussion the disciplinary limits and the traditional conception of the figure of the author.
Both Uriburu’s colorations and Benedit’s large habitable installations show a projectual aspect in their work methods, -undoubtedly supported by their architectural training- consistent with the difficulties of realization, both in budgetary terms and in terms of the need to carry out interdisciplinary research. This is evident in the development of schemes and project drawings, especially in Benedit, essential for planning technical aspects, as can be seen in the drawings presented here, Proyecto múltiple – Mini Biotron (1971) and Proyecto múltiple – Pecera para peces tropicales, ( 1971). Other drawings, which did not necessarily go beyond their apparent project aspect and where Benedit leans towards a more pictorial elaboration, represent mechanically articulated animals that display in detail the different elements that compose them, as is the case of Proyecto para una langosta articulada ( 1974) and Fernando Rufus – Vulgar “Hornero” (1976). Here, the natural-artificial relationship is revealed, but rather than as an opposition between nature and culture or nature and art, it appears as a joint collaboration where the technical artifice acts in favor of nature, being able to give a technological response to a planetary crisis caused by anthropic impact.
Prototypes for an artificial garden at the Iris Clert gallery in Paris a few weeks before his first coloring. Still focused on the production of objects, he presented a group of works on cut acrylic plates linked to the natural world, cats and lambs, clouds and waterfalls, which made up a plastic garden in a pop setting. Already at that time, animals acquired a prominent place in García Uriburu’s work, which was later sustained by the representation of anacondas from the Amazon, giraffes in danger of extinction, oiled penguins, anteaters and vicuñas, dolphins and cows. Uriburu found in animals one of the most outstanding manifestations of nature, which he contrasted with famous New York City skyscrapers and constructions, such as a giraffe in front of the Pan Am mirrored tower or the head of a cow next to the Twin Towers. In this way, the artist denounced the binary opposition between nature and culture, a modern operation that, as Bruno Latour affirms, hierarchizes humanity above all living things, reducing them to mere resources to be exploited. In this sense, the city, the ultimate expression of the modern domination of the human, is represented in García Uriburu’s paintings in contrast with natural elements, and he also chooses for his colorations waters located in urban spaces, denouncing the destructive action of Man on them.
The work of both artists expresses this relationship, not necessarily oppositional, between nature and culture. The concern that both seem to show for animals, both for the local ones with their rural traditions and gaucho traces, as well as those of manifest precariousness and whose continuity as a species is in danger, allow us to think -from Benedit and García Uriburu, but also beyond them- of belonging to a community more than human, whose motivation is a concern for the habitat of all beings on the planet, that community that Latour calls “earthlings”. Recently María Puig de la Bellacasa stressed that the ecological “understood as the interdependent interaction between multiple forms of life, is collective by definition”, which leads not only to strengthen particular searches and knowledge, such as the proposals to merge life and art observed in García Uriburu, but also to an ethological concern, of the type developed by Benedit, which does not stop at the observation and investigation of animal behavior, but leads to an improvement in the life capacity of the whole, human and non-human. In this sense, an ecological formulation such as the one that can be observed in these works, but which – again – goes beyond them, also demands a strong ethical commitment.
Jesu Antuña y Mercedes Claus
Realidades sonoras y ficciones visuales
Eduardo Costa: 1966-today
Professor of letters, editor, proto-conceptualist (Alberro, 2001), genre creator (Herrera, 2008), sound poet, fashion novelist, journalist, essayist, volumetric painter are some of the titles Eduardo Costa has been defined with throughout his career: Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and New York, from 1966 to the present.
Tireless in his search for new paths in art, this admirer of Duchamp has the ability to find his artistic materialities in the unthinkable: a few stolen dialogues in the street to create the first oral literature, a fictional happening for a mass media art, a fake and unreachable gold accessory to infiltrate the mass media of fashion, semen itself as organic acrylic and acrylic as sculptural clay to expand the possibilities of painting.
Sound realisms and visual fictions. Eduardo Costa: 1966-hoy proposes a non-linear journey through the artist’s career in the gallery’s three rooms, using as reference points three events that took place in three spaces that are as emblematic as they are disparate: an iconic fashion magazine, a traditional fine arts museum, and a legendary rock record.
Anatomy lesson
“Don’t suffer, don’t suffer, it’s only fiction!”, Eduardo Costa requested to an audience that alternated between surprise and astonishment at the dissection of each of the works and the subsequent exhibition of their entrails. Presented on November 22, 2004 at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, La biología de la pintura n.° 2: La lección de anatomía was a didactic performance conceived to explain the invisible in the works belonging to a new genre developed by Costa since 1994: volumetric painting. Referred to by the American critic and poet Carter Ratcliff, volumetric paintings are composed not only of external surfaces but also of internal spaces. A volumetric painting of a watermelon is green on the outside, white and red on the inside. A head portrait contains both the organs, muscles and bones, invisible to the viewer, as well as the visible features traditionally manifested in flat painting or sculpture. Geometric abstractions are usually pure monochrome, painted in the same color from beginning to end. Without any other materiality than acrylic pigment and an occasional thickener, volumes are obtained by adding layer upon layer. The volumetric paintings free themselves from the traditional material supports of painting and sculpture to support themselves in each brushstroke with the aesthetics of modernism and the historical avant-garde. Thus, the pigments dissolve, thicken and solidify when mixed with constructivist, neoplasticist, concrete, perceptualist, minimalist or “pop” molecules. “For the (volumetric) paintings are the result of a wide range of concepts and legacies whose complex synthesis provides insight into how modernist paintings can be productively reformulated in the 21st century” (Alberro, 2001).
Of visual fictions and sonorous realisms
“The most exciting thing I’ve seen in recent years” proclaimed Alexander Liberman, art editor of American Vogue magazine between 1941 and 1962, after his meeting with Costa thanks to the intermediation of gallery owner Leo Castelli. On February 1, 1968, a strange accessory was published in its pages: Oreja. Photographed and commented by Richard Avedon and modeled by Marisa Berenson, granddaughter of surrealist fashion icon Elsa Schiaparelli and renowned art critic Bernard Berenson. Made in gold on the mold taken from Argentine model María Larreta in 1966, this object is part of Fashion Fiction I, along with other jewelry in the form of phalanges and hair. Costa was trying to broaden its audience, reaching out to the fashion mass media with a strategy that included fictionalizing a luxury product as well as making use of the visual and written languages characteristic of these publications. In the months following its print appearance, the object would be transformed into several real jewels at the request of a group of the magazine’s readers. Oreja is a bottle launched into the sea of media that has been and continues to be a reference and source of inspiration. In fashion, Gucci and its creative director, Alessandro Michele, will produce a ready-to-wear version in 2019, which was also featured in Harper’s Bazaar magazine on Serena Williams’ ear, shot by Alexi Lubomirski. Also, in the field of art, several artists have cited it as is the case of the work Untitled, 2021 photograph by La Chola Poblete where the artist adopts the same position and framing of Berenson’s photo and replaces the materiality of gold with that of bread; with this operation “the prosthetic jewel acquires its luxury character, not from the shine of the metal, but from the homey warmth of bread” (Martínez Depietri, 2021).
At the same time, Costa continued to explore oral language, ethnographic realism, sound and the possibilities of the stereophonic recorder in his search for new materialities and media. This path had taken shape for the first time in 1966 in the project Poema ilustrado for the exhibition El Poema y su sombrura, curated by Mercedes Álvarez Reynolds at the Galería de Arte Joven de Radio Municipal; finding in this oral ready-made an objective and external memory to the artist who surpassed photography in her ability to achieve greater realism, inaugurating another new genre: oral literature. In 1969, together with artist John Perreault, a tape that includes the work of fifteen artists and poets from Latin America and the United States, accompanied by a manifesto written by both of them. For the authors, “the works exist entirely in terms of auditory phenomena, rather than in terms of visual sign systems, thus beginning a new art of the tape recorder that has in common with written literature the fact that it refers to real language” (Costa-Perreault, 1969). “While Oreja had materialized the anatomy of sound reception-the aural with the auditory-Tape Poems focused on the material storage of sound outside the body” (McEnaney, 2016).
For Costa, oral language is an immersed historical ocean in which he will remain diving throughout his career. The appearance of an ear made of gold can be read as a tribute to the human organ that receives and decodes this ancestral expression of culture, an auricular-auric-auratic object.
A honeymoon in the hand
“I want you to write a lyric for Virus – did you think it would be about any particular issue? Yes, about masturbation”. On October 25, 1985 the album Locura is released, the fifth studio work of the group Virus, the most successful of the band in sales and the favorite of its leader Federico Moura. Costa is the author of the lyrics of Una luna de miel en la mano. Inspired by the fictional play Everyman His Own Wife Or, A Honeymoon in the Hand: A National Immorality in Three Orgasms imagined by Buck Mulligan’s character in James Joyce’s most famous work Ulysses. Some works made at different stages in Costa’s production contain the male body as a theme or as a source of plastic material. With an ambiguous, delicate and poetic sexual charge, these works resort to the torso, genitals and semen to try out new genres in art. A soft and sinuous rectangle next to an erect cylinder constitute a pornogeometric painting, the ejaculations are gestures of an orgasmic informalism on the canvas, the perforations on the stretcher bars resemble spatialism à la Fontana. Under the light of a honey-colored acrylic moon, a hand holding a cucumber, a roll of toilet paper and a small notebook with a poem written by Costa in his adolescence, compose an intimate still life captured minutes before self-satisfaction, a moment mori that foreshadows the petit morte.
Joaquín Rodríguez
Buenos Aires, October 11, 2023
Revelaciones
This exhibition by Cynthia Cohen shows the current state of her perception of the world and the way she understands life and art today. Each painting is an exploration of perceptions that allow her to project internal dynamics outwards. A creative process related to Batlle Planas “inner model” and the free associations of automatism, but with a very different pictorial resolution. It is a shift from consumer pop to metaphysical pop, with elements of camp and surrealism in its use of extravagance, humor and absurdity. As Susan Sontag defines it, Camp is “a sensibility; it is not an idea or a style, but a way of seeing the world”.
The stories are built around situations and images that point her in this new direction. It unites, in a contradictory way, different elements that provoke alienation. The artist is the one who points, who expands the possibilities of the cosmos with new articulations of the real, understanding that the real is also what is hidden and sometimes unhidden. This is what happens in “accept the thoughts that arise”, where the artist constructs a work in which an infinite number of fascinating scenes and thoughts are superimposed, with no apparent logical structure, as happens when we meditate. There are fragments of an antique French Aubusson tapestry, pieces of sashimi, fish, skies, a cornucopia and iron bars.
The hands point and at the same time create paradoxical worlds, as in the scene of the painting “Amazonita”, where an emerald is floating above a mass of green against a mountain landscape. It is the signalling of contradiction, where the absurd is the basis for the production of pictorial discourse. Throughout the Renaissance we find hands with the index finger pointing towards what seems to be the interpretation of the riddle. A secret to be revealed in each story.
We feel the latency of eroticism in tongues coming out of a wallpaper where red prevails in “Libertine”, an installation with digital recreations projected on the walls of the gallery hall.
In “Azurita”, the sensuality of taste is embodied by a tongue licking a creamy cherry, and the senses are heightened to the extreme by the rare beauty of a huge blue stone floating above the landscape.
The stones that Cynthia used in her first exhibition, when she painted them in groups as gems set in rings, are back. At that time, the context was linked to a reflection on economic power as an allusion to the tyranny of the patriarchal institution. These first rings later became enormous protagonists, with perfectly painted jewels of extreme rigour in the faceting and brilliance of each one.
Today, the rocks are structured in an expressive way, far removed from the precision of those days. Now they are part of a crystalline journey in which he has found another goal in his identity as an artist. The conviction that the work activates something ineffable, something that has no name because there is no word to describe it. He places himself in the line of poets and mystics who have sought to bear witness to transcendent experiences.
That is why we cannot rationally understand what is happening in these works, but we must enter into these dwellings proposed by the artist. The history of art has repeatedly tried to manifest the metaphysical dimension, as in the works of Hilma af Klint, Malevich or the Argentinean Xul Solar, among many others.
What makes Cynthia’s work so original is that she materialises these ideas with a contemporary approach, mixing brightly coloured objects against the backdrop of the Argentinean landscape. She also draws on her own history. She reappropriates her artistic autobiography with new meanings.
When she painted flowers, as in jewellery, his “Roses” suggested the success of the perfect appearance, open in its maximum splendour. Today, the flower in his painting “A Wish” has fallen petals, is almost withered and is the only work that, instead of floating, has to be held up. She shamelessly exposes the fall and the melancholic register of the final stage.
Endings, like farewells, are encounters. I celebrate this encounter of a new direction in Cynthia Cohen’s work. It was there from the beginning, but today she has been able to manifest it. I think of the story of the English pilot who, having miscalculated his course, discovered England under the impression that it was an unknown island in the South Sea. And when he planted the flag, he had finally arrived in his own country.
Cynthia discovered in Cruz Chica the key that opened the portal to a new meaning. A belief in art as a transcendent and spiritual revelation.
Laura Batkis
Curator
Hiperestesia
The art of the passage to contemporary art
Marcelo E. Pacheco
Informalism, thresholds, stitching, decollage, other art, driping, are different semblances that enter on a base of paint in superimposed layers of remains of materials, also, drips of different materials such as oil, tempera, collage different from the one that had been given as wire to make the piece: floor rags, rags grids, mixtures of different types of wood, sometimes some cardboard, cardboard and all material, mixed with frames of them. The base is always complete with very outstanding collage temperatures, reaching different kinds of assemblage.
There are different titles for variations and regional schools that show different typologies: informalism, tachism, collage and decollage, and as long as one chooses the superimpositions of materials. The two extremes are abstract expressionism, pure solidity and dualities of oil, working in layers of brushstrokes that burst in different hardness and subtlety, as in the works of Del Prete or Pucciarelli and, in tachismo or informalism that works with traces, marks, stamp, executive transparency, of all kinds of things. The two extremes play with the range of the material that moves away or gets closer and closer to the specific weight and the network of the real.
At the other point of the space appear the abstract or non-figurative with collage as a base and hyper-abundant collage stickers that finally explodes in the assemblages. The first occurs more fully in the New York School culminating with Pollock and locally with Greco and Del Prete. The second occurs with less traversed collage, being protagonist rags grids, floor rags, draped, as Towas, Peluffo, Kemble, Lublin.
With several cast manipulations, different variants with Creole personality are grouped together, making the pieces divided in the graphics and draperies and in the fabrics worked with the tips of the handles of the brushes or their coats.
A special note is the group of works by the Uruguayan Teresa Vila with her semi-abstract paintings. In the territory the games between the freedom of non-figuration and the freedom of non-abstractions.
From informalism to concrete art and kinetic and optical art, different virtual visual forms or boxes with their own supports follow each other.
The total filling of the surface reaches the maximum, even the frames, and they choose multiple bases, the infinitude of choices as a basis for their stories that are non-figurative. The current exhibition is a very good example of diversity.
The general qualities of the informalist language, forms a bundle of figurative works confronted, or interwoven, or directly mixed or in tension. The manner is clearly seen as an astonishing manner since the 1940s, although as a group it was shown in only two exhibitions, both in 1959. This location and this movement of comings and goings and ideas, place Informalism as one of the broad thresholds of passage from modern art to contemporary art. From this point, the neo-criollo informalism of artists such as Peluffo, Greco and Kemble nourish with frictions the three enclaves that since the end of the 1950s have been running towards post-historic art.
The starry ordered by parallel and simultaneous conversations shows a whole possible to be broken or in sets that intermingle.
A sample of the poly-informalism that was deployed throughout the field of objective accidents and adjectives of history and aesthetics.
Geometrías en paralelo
Ary Brizzi and María Martorell
Few artists shared as many spaces and a common vision as Ary Brizzi and María Martorell. Although they were only circumstantially part of a group, criticism and history brought them together.
By the mid-1950s, geometry had become a movement of great intensity, variety and international projection. It was the language of Modernism in painting, design, architecture and the arts in general. In Argentina, a third wave, called neo-concretism, emerged after the tradition forged by artists of the stature of Tomás Maldonado, Alfredo Hlito, Enio Iommi, Gyula Kosice, Arden Quin and Raúl Lozza, among the masters of the 1940s.
María Martorell was born in Salta in 1909. Ary Brizzi, in Buenos Aires in 1930. They belonged to the same artistic generation despite the significant age difference between them. María married young, raised a family and postponed her vocation, like many women of her time. Ary, already at the age of 15, while attending the School of Fine Arts, worked with her father and brother in architecture and interior design. They are two different lives that converge in the same passion, sustained with talent and tenacity. The first time they exhibited together was in 1963, when Romero Brest invited them to the exhibition Eight Constructive Artists, at the National Museum of Fine Arts, together with Manuel Espinosa, Raul Lozza, Eduardo Sabelli, Miguel Angel Vidal and Carlos Silva. That same year, 1963, the panoramic exhibition Del Arte Concreto a la Nueva Tendencia [1]included both artists and categorically identified them with that “new tendency”. A new trend that, starting from the main concepts of concrete art (total abstraction and autonomy of form, abolition of illusionism, scientific aesthetics), ventured to go further, transforming geometry according to the laws of the human eye. The “generative art”[2], optical and kinetic, more linked to Europe, and the color field and the hard edge, of American origin, made up the innovations that both Martorell and Brizzi practiced in those nascent 1960s.[3]
With a similar background, based on Bauhaus methodology, the heritage of Russian constructivism and the external and local tradition of concrete art, Brizzi and Martorell chose to work in series, introducing small variations on a given initial proposition; investigating the syntax of color in relation to forms, real or virtual movement, light and its infinite plastic and symbolic implications.
The artistic model of personalities such as Max Bill – winner in 1952 of the grand prizes at the first South American biennial, the São Paulo Biennial – and Victor Vasarely, who exhibited his work in Buenos Aires in 1958 after participating in the IV Biennial, left their mark on the poetics of geometry and multidisciplinary development. Both artists and designers blurred the boundaries of art.
Martorell witnessed the changes from Europe. He lived there for two years, between 1955 and 1956, and avidly visited museums and workshops of contemporary artists such as Georges Vantongerloo, Nicolas Schöeffer and Jesús Soto, who were embarking on the new geometric directions.
With its vocation for total abstraction, concrete art had left a question floating in the air for the next generation to resolve: what is the subject of painting? Centuries of figurative art, of representation, had put geometry at the crossroads of having to defend itself from the consideration of being a “decorative style”.
The theme of a work of art, Martorell pointed out, is “its harmony, its rhythm. The theme is only the means of directing our attention towards appearances and inviting us to go through those appearances to reach its spirit”.
In line with these reflections, Brizzi asserted that painting is a “unique fact caused by the use of a unique medium”, that the “plastic fact” is given without support in any other reality than itself and its purpose is “to sensitize human perception and its inner vision”.
Thus, was born a painting that is as close to the eye as it is to the unapproachable “inside”, to the spirit of both the artist and his audience. However, this approach without known objects, metaphors, or literary narratives gradually became a language that encapsulated the most basic and yet most sophisticated forms of human perception. Governed by the laws of vision, sensual curves navigate through spaces of clear colors; they attract, repel, change course. A beam of light breaks a plane, shatters into the colors that form it. Circles and lines reverberate in the extreme contrast of black and white. These were just some of the themes of geometry that Martorell and Brizzi worked on, filling their canvases with musical resonances. Precisely music, in its extreme abstraction, was one of the models used to think these compositions detached from representation, as strict and rational as close to emotions.
Artists with a vocation for knowledge, both were self-trained in the reading of diverse materials that concentrated the interests of their time: science, technology, the extension of art to design and daily life.
From the beginning, Brizzi designed and applied his artistic patterns to pieces of graphic art and advertising. The “studies” he carried out between 1955 and 1962 are works in themselves and show that application to communication which, no one doubts anymore, does not reside only in words. Using state-of-the-art materials such as synthetic enamels, then acrylics and innovative metallic alloys, he painted, created sculptures and practiced a craft that he then called “commercial architecture” and that covered the urgent needs of exhibition in the innovative industrial fairs of the economic bonanza of developmentalism.
On this path of art extension, Martorell, enraptured by the medieval tapestries she had seen in France, wondered what would be the destiny of tapestry from Salta, still considered a handicraft. Tuning tradition with modernity would allow her to speak of a contemporary textile art based on pre-Inca motifs, the myths and legends of the Argentine Northwest and the expert hands that still executed them. From this incursion was born the collaboration with Salta artist Carlos Luis “Pajita” García Bez and his weavers, who combined Andean geometry with contemporary geometry in Martorell’s designs; a virtuous encounter that still echoes today and the textile boom.
During the 70’s, in the Acrylics Paolini company awards, Brizzi and Martorell were also keen to create “useful” (design) and “useless” (artistic) objects with the precious material, acrylic, which connoted the beauty and practicality of modern life.
At the same time as these explorations, in 1966, Brizzi and Martorell were part of Grupo 13 (G13), which had its presentation in Buenos Aires [4]and represented a true compendium of the geometric tendencies of the time. The exhibition received excellent comments, such as those of the critic Cayetano Córdova Iturburu, who saw in its excellence the counterpart of the Braque Prize, dedicated to celebrating the “nothings of the Pops”.[5]
Indeed, the new geometry was contemporary to other trends in figuration such as pop or the youth of the “urban myths”, as the French critic Pierre Restany described them.
That same year, Brizzi and Martorell participated in 11 Pintores Constructivos, in which they coincided once again with Espinosa, Mac Entyre and Vidal. Obviously, these coincidences are not coincidental-nor is the current one we are presenting-since, unlike other trends in contemporary art, geometry was a space of confluences rather than differences. It signified an international language, a sort of Esperanto of forms, for which Europeans and Americans in general had been fighting since the beginning of the twentieth century; a language that, like all languages, gradually incorporated “words” that made it as accessible as figuration had been traditionally. Light, the pictorial representation of light, was one of them. The scales of values, also called degradé, burst into the work of Brizzi and Martorell to blur planes, turn color into atmosphere, deny the two-dimensionality of the support or launch into a world of visual and symbolic suggestions that were previously labeled as naturalistic.
Geometry accompanies us today as evidence of a place of mastery in Argentine art. It was a trend that triumphed at international level, which was loaded with new meanings accompanying the times, but which, essentially, speaks from modernity.
María José Herrera
Historian and curator. Author of the book Ary Brizzi. The Harmony of Modernity (in press 2023) and co-author of María Martorell. The energy of color (2013)
[1] Organized by the Museum of Modern Art of the city of Buenos Aires (MAM).
[2] Creado por Eduardo Mac Entyre y Miguel Ángel Vidal en 1960.
[3] They also coincided in Beyond Geometry (1967), an anthological exhibition that introduced the “new sculpture”, the primary structures, held at the Di Tella Institute, on Florida Street.
[4] Exhibiting with Armando Durante, Manuel Espinosa, María Juana Heras Velasco, Jorge Lezama, Mac Entyre, César Paternosto, Alejandro Puente, Sabelli, Carlos Silva, María Simón and Vidal.
[5] Cayetano Córdova Iturburu, “Dos caras de una medalla”, El Mundo newspaper, Buenos Aires, July 31, 1966.
Edgardo Giménez – Once upon a time…
Edgardo Giménez is presenting at María Calcaterra gallery “Once upon a time… “ an exhibition that is a small anthology with works from different periods.
Laura Batkis, curator and great friend of the artist, met with Edgardo to talk and do this interview in which Giménez makes his interests clear and his position about art.
Laura Batkis: What is the function of art, or what is it for?
Edgardo Giménez: The art has to serve to make you feel good and happy. If the art doesn’t have an important rol in your life is because you are not in front of a work of art. I mean, art has to be put to the test. The real art does not leave you unharmed.
LB: It has to make the viewer happy and whoever believes it,
EG: Im already happy to did it. The real true artist do whatever it want, like it or not to the people. No net. I have to thank God that gave me the posibility to choose what
is to be in connect permanent with the creation.
LB: The exhibition is the best part?
EG: No, the major part is when im making the piece of art and its
LB: It came to you often?
EG: ¡¡¡Yes!!! ¡¡I have a facility for it occurs to me that you don´t know!! I have one instant creativity, like coffee.
LB: you are all the time like…
EG: ¡Connected! With something.
LB: Do you write your ideas?
EG: No. It´s all about memory. It can think of works that are triggers to make an exhibition.
LB: Speaking of ideas, let´s talk about conceptual art
EG: Im not interested. Because it doesn´t moves you.
LB: And if one idea active the thought?
EG: ¡Art is visual! If you want to make a text, you have to dedicate to write. You have to choose lenguage. And if it not
LB:When did you realize that you want to become an artist?
EG: At the age of 4. Lets say that i always knew it. I loved the Walt Disney world, that was one of release to enter to the creation.
LB: And then you realize that art let you scape of every day life
EG: Yes, that cames naturally for me.
LB: Be like somewhere else…
EG: Yes, and more now that the world is getting worse, there´s no breathing. The salvation that i have always had is to be linked with creation, a place of pleasure, in which im not at all isolated from what is happening outside, im aware of everything.
LB: I mean, it´s not necessary to be in a place suffering without allowing some things
EG: i don´t believe in suffer at all.
LB: And how it´s that?
EG: I always consider that being alive is a big blessing. The thing is that the vast majority of people either don´t know what they want and don´t know what turns them on happy. It is very serious and rare, they think that the thing is on one way and then they realize no, not on that way, that it was another, but they dont even know which one is the other either.
LB: And you realice very quickly which way was…
EG: Yes. Im from Santa Fe, when my aunt took me to the movies to watch snow white i came out levitation.
LB: Is the proposal you give to the people, to enter that world of imagination.
EG: I´ll tell you an anecdote. There was a marriage that was fighting in the room where there was a work of mine, a cute one. Since she was waiting for the monkey to looked at her, she told her husband to go to the other room because the monkey wouldn’t let her concentrate on the fight. That sounds great to me. After this, i made the house for her, and one day she told me that she had a defect, and that is that she would not let her leave the house because she was very happy there. That’s what happens to people when they enter that orbit, they don’t want to leave anymore. This is the idea with art. That they realize that there is a different way of living, that it is better, more pleasant. Being in daily contact with beauty is good. It is like listening to a wonderful sound of a brilliant composer that reaches you somewhere, that only that sound reaches you. When you have the radars to listen to that, you live better. It is about appreciating all the things that help you to live better.
LB: In this exhibition there will be works whose sketches are from the 60’s and 70’s, making work physics of previous works that you had draw.
EG: Yes, the skyscrapers, for example. They will have lights inside. I think that’s a great thing of the big cities where everything is light and such an incredible scenography.
LB: There is something parodic in your works
EG: There are always parodies, of course. There are humorous comments about reality. For get out of the everyday that is overwhelming.
LB: Are you excited to do this exhibition?
EG: Its excites me just like the first time. Just like the first time.
Víctor Magariños D. – In silence
Some artists need to be kept at a certain distance. They are authors whose works we just have to “pass over in silence,” as Derrida would say. They are artists who are doomed or blessed to remain lonely, to have their own anatomy occur in time and space, with singular and endogamic forces. They take place in reality, or graze it, without the need for extra accommodations or external narratives.
Do not be mistaken, these are not works with an arrogant self-sufficiency, fortified images, or impenetrable geographies. They are simply works that create energy and do not need external stimuli to go into action. The eyes wander on the paper, canvas, object, and tie together each signifier and signified in their different dimensions. Magariños does not distract himself with the creation of novel artifices. He insists on an alphabet that shows the virtues of the laws of vision and perception, which controls the extent of what is possible in the cosmos and of man in the cosmos, and which shows the highest splendors, with mystery, playfulness—replicating thousands of illusions. An alphabet that exhibits elements and structures without borders, where nothing restricts the modern artist as “historical truth” is to shred his works of their temporal dimension, their ability to continue to take place in the present, when their imaginary, with the passing of time, finds the events. That is why history is never about the past, but about the future. 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, and all the elements that live in expectation on the stretcher.
As regards non-figurative art from the 1910 onwards, the stories are well known. Abstract and non-figurative movements and schools multiplied around several European countries as part of the fight for abstraction. The Russian avant-gardes, such as constructivism and rayonism; Kandinsky in Germany; neo-plasticism or Mondrian’s De Stjil and van Doesburg in Holland; vorticism in Great Britain; orphism in Paris with Delaunay; within Italian futurism, Balla’s and Severini’s approaches and Emilio Pettoruti’s abstract drawings from 1914; Arp and his painted wood reliefs, and another Dadaist, Kurt Schwitters, with his Merz, were the most outstanding examples of the cosmopolitan scene and, already in the 20s, the German Bauhaus was showing its abstract experiences in design, painting and architecture.
The controversies between abstraction and non-figuration, free and geometric abstraction, abstraction and concretism, between constructivism, suprematism and Pevsner’s realism soon showed the diversity that had been opened in art after banishing any trace of depictions of reality. The position of concrete artists—to which Magariños early adhered to—was established in 1930 by Theo van Doesburg in the magazine Art Concret. Non-figuration did not rely on a process of abstracting from reality, comes from the fantasy of being able to make the “true” past known leaves historical imagination out of the picture.