MCMC Galería is pleased to present “POP, Abstraction and Minimalism” a group show that gathers the artworks of different Argentine artists: Miguel Angel Vidal, Ary Brizzi, César Paternosto, Antonio Asís, Rogelio Polesello, Eduardo Costa, Edgardo Giménez, María Boneo and Azul Caverna.

The exhibition proposes to relate and explore different artistic languages ​​such as Pop-art, Geometric Abstraction, Minimalism and Conceptualism, from the 60s to the present.

The corpus of works exhibited is intertwined in an agonizing and antagonistic discourse, where colors and shapes attract and repel to each other. It is in this way that Edgardo Giménez’s Pop animals coexist, together with the rhythmic minimalism of César Paternosto and in turn, Polesello’s colorful play on his geometric abstractions.

“Pop, Abstraction and Minimalism” combines and juxtaposes the discourse of Argentine artists representing the main artistic trends of the 60s and 70s, and today.

Miguel Ángel Vidal (1928 – 2009) was an Argentine painter, draftsman and graphic designer. He investigated naturalism and studied the line as an expression. Over time, his expressive needs led him to investigate Abstraction and Geometry. In 1959 he founded, together with Eduardo Mac Entyre, the Generative Art Movement of Buenos Aires.

Ary Brizzi (1930 – 2014) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina; he developed a career as a painter, sculptor, and designer; and refrente of geometric abstraction in Argentina. In his works, the concepts of “visual reality” and “plastic reality” were upheld by Brizzi, who did not speak of geometry or abstraction, but of “concrete forms”, as the Bauhaus constructivists would call them.

César Paternosto (1931) was born in La Plata, Argentina. Reference artist of geometric abstraction in Argentina. In 1969 Paternosto began a series of works where at first glance the front of the work, white and uniform, did not reveal an image. The geometric artist began to paint on the wide edges of the frame. Paternosto’s color planes appear and disappear as the traveler or viewer walks.

Antonio Asis (1932 – 2019) Argentine artist, exponent of the op-art. Throughout the 1940s, Asis explored abstraction and nonrepresentative art; with the publication of the “Arturo” magazine in 1944, and the creation of the Concrete Art-Invention Association. In 1956 he moved to Paris where he began a series of works in which he considered how the phenomena of light could be mediated through photography. His work is characterized by studying the vibrations between colors and the many possibilities within monochromatic compositions.

Rogelio Polesello (1939-2014) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Painter and sculptor, he presented his first solo exhibition in 1959 at the Peuser gallery where his admiration for Víctor Vasarely was manifested. Shortly after, his geometry obtained references to the New Abstraction with resources from optical artists, such as the offset of geometric shapes, with which it produced a strong effect of instability. He worked with painting, engraving and acrylic objects capable of generating optical effects that decompose the image.

Eduardo Costa (1940, Buenos Aires) is an Argentine artist who lived twenty-five years in the United States and four in Brazil. He began his career in Buenos Aires as part of the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella generation and continued to work in New York, where he made a strong contribution to the local avant-garde. He has collaborated with American artists such as Vito Acconci, Scott Burton, John Perreault, and Hannah Weiner, among others. In Brazil, he participated in projects organized by Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Antonio Manuel, Lygia Clark and others from the Rio de Janeiro school.

Edgardo Giménez (1942) was born in Santa Fe, Argentina. A self-taught artist, he began working in advertising graphics. He is one of the greatest representatives of Pop art in Argentina. He was part of the mythical Instituto di Tella during the 60s and 70s. His works celebrate color and joy.

María Boneo (1959) is an Argentine sculptor who lives in Buenos Aires. Her work knew how to be figurative, today more inclined to abstraction, in it,it is still possible to trace the memory of the female body in the meticulous program of deformity purification to which her sculptures were subjected. Boneo worked with different materials, from early wood carving, to marble carving, and now bronze.

Azul Caverna (1979) his work reviews geometric artistic movements and traditions to investigate the ascetic use of form and color. He intuitively seeks to understand what is the function of a current geometric language and what is the influence of contemporary personal avant-gardes, in a discipline historically influenced by group movements.

MCMC gallery is pleased to announce Silvia Torras’ solo exhibition, titled Youth and joy; a joy that is not silly exuberance, but true joy, with a text by Florencia Qualina.

The Informalist movement that dominated the scene in Buenos Aires between the late 1950s and the first half of the 1960s was led by a group of young people with a revolutionary hunger. They shared a visceral rejection of the dominant art that they considered dull, predictable, boring; they wanted a new art founded on the collapse of Good Taste. The abstract painting that was born from there, made of fast brushstrokes loaded with matter, often embedded with something abject about the world and the body – urine, blood, rubbish – took over the galleries of the city with the same dizzying pace.

It didn’t take long for the excitement to fade. They perceived that the force had been absorbed into the official system; or that Painting had exhausted its life cycle – towards the mid-60s the center of the aesthetic debate was dominated by the statement: Painting is Dead – these were two perspectives that digested the adventures towards new experimental paths. Pop, Conceptualism, Happenings, were the names under which new forms were illuminated for a time that required and obtained energetic, constant, volcanic renovations.

When the movement had dissipated Kenneth Kemble and Alberto Greco, the great agitators, had managed to settle on the main stage of The Great Ruptures and these cuts signified the great capital of art history. Other names would be inseparable from Pop, action art, settings or land-art and its passage through Informalism would be established as a baptism in modern grammar. Numerous valuable interventions were left behind, unexplored, semi-forgotten: a large part of them correspond to the women of Informalism. At this point the work of Silvia Torras is introduced.

In the first three years of the sixties Silvia Torras, in addition to being part of the foundational collective experiences for the future of installation and Conceptualism, such as Destructive Art – 61’– and Man before Man –62’– produced a powerful volume of paintings. Some of them were seen in the individual exhibitions that she had in the Peuser Gallery – 60 ‘- and in the Lirolay Gallery –61 -, or in prestigious awards, such as the Di Tella and Ver y Estimar in 1963. In that year she definitely closed her artistic career, her life in Buenos Aires and her marriage to Kemble. She died in 1970, at the age of 34, in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

The temptation to foresee a truncated journey when noticing such a young death vanishes when knowing her intense and extensive work: for Silvia Torras, time in art was enough to leave a work in which pathos and ornamentation converge. Unlike the informalist commonplace so moderate, harsh in the use of color, she is distinguished by taking it as an emblem: yellows, blues, greens, reds vibrate like jungles or lava storms. The dramatic sense of her painting has very high points, overwhelming when it is directed to huge canvases – another singularity of hers at a time that reserved contained formats, not too large for women and thus moderated its ambitions – however, it does not give up when reduced. Going back to Silvia Torras’ work is essential to continue spinning a diverse art history, also made up of forgetfulness, fragments and untimely appearances.

Florencia Qualina

Marzo, 2021