BRIGHT GEOMETRY - ABSTRACT GEOMETRIC PAINTINGS AND SCULPTURE BY ARTISTS FROM ARGENTINA AND URUGUAY,

1950-1980.  Featuring the work of María Freire, Antonio Llorens, César Paternosto, Rogelio Polesello, Carlos Silva, Horacio Torres

Cecilia de Torres Ltd. presents this exhibition to coincide with Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America,

1920s-50s, February - May 23, 2010 at the Newark Museum.

With the 1934 arrival of Torres-García in Uruguay, the development of modernism in the region accelerated.  He created the Association of Constructive Art (1935-1940) and the Taller Torres-García (1943-1962) in Montevideo.  Simultaneously in Buenos Aires, Argentinean and Uruguayan artists created the Madí and Arte Concreto groups.  As expressed by Gyula Kosice one of the artists, Madí destroyed the taboo of the painting by breaking with the traditional frame.  The Madí invention of the irregular frame freed painting from the laws of composition that up to then had circumscribed it for centuries.

                       

              Torres-García returns to Montevideo.”  Front-page                            Juan Melé, Irregular Frame &Bright_Geos/8470 2, 1946

        headline of newspaper Hoy.  April 30, 1934, Montevideo                                  Collection Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

The originality and vitality of geometric art in Buenos Aires and Montevideo caught the interest of several museums in the U.S. in the 1960s and a few scheduled exhibitions of South American art. 

Two artists in our show, Rogelio Polesello and Carlos Silva were included in the 1964 survey New Art of Argentina at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis that traveled to Akron, Atlanta, and Austin.  In the catalogue introduction for that exhibition,  Jorge Romero Brest, then director of the Di Tella Visual Art Center in Buenos Aires, traced the inspiration for Argentine artists to the De Stijl, the Bauhaus  and Max Bill, and in turn, noted their participation in geometric art developments in Europe as early as the 1940s when the Madí artists showed their irregular shaped canvases at the 1948 Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, and to Julio Le Parc (b. 1928) and Hugo Demarco (1932-1995), organizers in Paris of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel in 1960, two instances of the exchanges between Argentina and Europe.  The 1946 publication in Buenos Aires of Lucio Fontana’s Manifesto Blanco further illustrates how ideas of international effect were launched from the banks of the River Plate.

The Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art (MAMBA) was founded in 1956, and in 1963 the family of the Argentine industrialist Torcuatto Di Tella created a foundation, the Di Tella Center for Visual Arts, that played a central role promoting the local and international avant-garde.  According to Marcelo Pacheco, MALBA’s (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano Buenos Aires) director, the influence of the Di Tella Institute has been a principal subject in modern Argentine art history, stirring nostalgia for that cultured, international, and progressive lost Utopia.  The Institute’s director was the art critic Jorge Romero Brest, one of his great achievements was to create the Di Tella Center international painting prize.  Among the prominent jurors who were invited to Buenos Aires were Alfred Barr, Jean Cassou, Clement Greenberg, Jacques Lassaigne, André Malraux, Pierre Restany, James Johnson Sweeney, and Lionello Venturi.  In 1962, Louise Nevelson won the International Prize, as did Kenneth Noland in 1964.

Rogelio Polesello (b. 1939) was considered a young prodigy, at fifteen he worked as a graphic designer in an advertising agency where he designed posters for industrial companies, and learned printing techniques, the use of airbrush and color transfer.  He later applied these processes to his abstract paintings.

              

Rogelio Polesello: Two works: Double Ovals, 1959 Acrylic on paper, 16½ x 16½ in., 41,5 x 41,5 cm.

According to the Argentine critic Mercedes Casanegra, 1959 was a key year for Polesello, who was only twenty when he started researching optical effects recalling his childhood fascination of looking at things through glass.  His later transparent acrylic panels with optically carved lenses are already suggested in these 1959 black and white geometric drawings as they reveal Polesello’s inclination towards the Op side of kinetic art.    

In 1966, Thomas Messer the Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum curated the exhibition The Emergent Decade: Latin American Painters and Paintings in the 1960s.  He invited Cornell Capa, to photograph the artists working in their studios.

Rogelio Polesello photographed by Cornell Capa, 1966

Capa photographed Polesello spray painting on the terrace of his Buenos Aires studio using wire screens and metal grills to filter the successive coats of sprayed colors.  By superimposing the patterns of grills as if they were Benday dots, zones of color are juxtaposed with black or with a contrasting color, creating middle tone areas.  According to critic Oscar Masotta, in these paintings Polesello aimed to give the sensation of a glowing, luminous quality that is simultaneously airy and watery.

                   

           Rogelio Polesello: Orange, ca.1966 Acrylic &                  Rogelio Polesello: Red, ca.1966 Acrylic & Airbrush/ canvas

        Airbrush/canvas  39 x 31½ in., 100 x 82,5 cm.                     34⅝ x 45 inches., 88 x 115 cm.

Polesello’s Plexiglas panels feature carved concave lenses of different sizes in geometric configurations which magnify and multiply the objects seen through it.

                      

Rogelio Polesello: Acrylic lens, 1968  Carved Acrylic panel, 75½ x 38 x 1 in., 192 x 96,5 x 2,5 cm.

They were first shown in Buenos Aires in 1966 in the exhibition Plastic Art in Plastic at the Museum of Fine Arts.  These works come alive with the active role of the viewer as he/she circulates around them multiplying and magnifying or shrinking the body image, so the viewer has a priority over the transparent object itself which disappears due to its translucence.  As Casanegra explains, these works constituted Polesello’s passage into the three-dimensional plane, and are a playful investigation into transparency and transfiguration.

We present three early works by César Paternosto (1931), who in 1966 was awarded the First Prize at the III Biennial of American Art in Córdoba, Argentina by a jury led by Alfred Barr, Jr., the Chief Curator at MoMA, who acquired Paternosto’s Duino, a two part shaped canvas composition for the museum.   The work was shown in MoMA’s 1967 exhibition The 1960’s: Painting and Sculpture from the Museum Collection.  By the end of 1967 Paternosto settled in New York.    

     

              Paternosto’s  Duino at MoMA, New York, 1967                Untitled Complex Unit, 1969 Acrylic on board, 30 x 40 in., 76,5 x 102 cm. 

In 1969, his painted three-dimensional assemblage, Untitled Complex Unit, was exhibited at the A.M. Sachs Gallery in New York along with El Sur, a lateral vision painting.  Paternosto has written that he took the title from a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, but that he also used “South” in the titles of other works to indicate his awareness of his own “southern” [marginal] condition. 

By moving the emphasis of the depicted surface to the outer edge of the canvas, and extending it over a much deeper than usual stretcher and leaving the frontal surface unpainted, Paternosto challenged the tradition of experiencing a painting head on by looking at it frontally.  The possibility of a lateral or oblique viewpoint developed from his observation of Mondrian’s compositions, where the color areas delineated by black lines, are pushed to the edge and prolonged onto the side of the support.  Paternosto stated that his lateral or oblique vision canvases take Mondrian’s space structuring to its ultimate consequences.

César Paternosto: El Sur, 1969  Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 in., 122 x 122 cm.    

In 2007, El Sur was included in High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975.  This travelling ICI exhibition curated by Katy Siegel covered a period largely overlooked by museums and critics, when both Abstract Painting and New York City were struggling to survive.  Raphael Rubinstein in a review in Art in America (September 2007), explained that one reason so many artists in the exhibition have been forgotten is that they were working very much against the grain, in a period when the medium of painting was deemed by many artists and critics to have reached its conclusion, to have been surpassed by other art forms, to have died. 

Art in America, on the same page, illustrated Jo Baer’s 1970 Speculum, one of her white ground wraparound canvases, and Paternostos’s 1969 El Sur, underscoring their resemblance.  Paternosto described the impetus behind this format: “I was breaking away from what I felt painting had become by then: an altogether tired, formalist marking of the frontal plane which no longer appeared to offer significant new options.”  Lynne Cooke in Jo Baer: the Minimalist Years 1960-1975 wrote that challenged by similar assertions, from Morris and Judd in particular, that painting was moribund, "antique," "almost finished"- in contrast to novel forms of three-dimensional work that were neither painting nor sculpture but "specific objects"- Baer fired terse verbal ripostes, most memorably to Morris in 1967, offering a characteristically polemical defense of her practice. 

In his 2001 book White/Red, Paternosto related that as a parallel development to Baer’s, his Oblique Vision canvases have been ignored by New York critics and curators.  He has been intrigued, to say the least, (he actually wrote of being furious), by the reluctance to acknowledge his work in relation to Baer’s ever since 1970 when Art Forum published a review of Baer’s show at Noah Goldowsky up until the celebration of the High Times, Hard Times exhibition in 2007.

César Paternosto: Fathom II, Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 72 in., 122 x 183 cm.

The Paternosto painting Fathom II from 1975 is a large horizontal canvas which was included in Paternosto’s second exhibition at Denise René Gallery in New York.  He wrote that by then the “modernist white” of the frontal surfaces had given way to sandy grays or pale terracotta, while some of the elements painted on the sides re-entered the frontal surface, as is the case in this serene composition. 

In 1964, Carlos Silva (1930-1987) won the National Di Tella Prize, and the following year was invited to participate in the VIII São Paulo Biennial.  The theoretical basis of his work was shaped by the writings of Kandinsky, Mondrian, Vantongerloo, Max Bill and Tomás Maldonado.  His preference for simple geometric shapes also owed something to the theories of the French mathematician Jules Henri Poincaré.  

Carlos Silva: Sin título, 1977  Tempera, ink on paper, 15 x 22½ in., 38 x 57 cm.

Using a rectilinear grid as a framework for marks of different color, Silva created suggestions of movement as in the 1972 tempera in the exhibition.  A grid lightly drawn in pencil was altered and painted with black and bright color dots to create within the paper sheet an illusion of depth and undulating motion.  

In the 1950s and 60s Montevideo hosted important international exhibitions such as Contemporary Painting in the Netherlands, that featured work by Mondrian, Van Doesburg, Vondemberge-Gildewart, Ouborg, Van Der Leck, Hunziker, etc.,  (1954), followed by shows of Antoni Tápies, Alberto Burri and the Brazillian Manabu Mabe.

                                                                                    

                           Antonio Llorens: Composition Red-Green,                                                   Antonio Llorens: Composition in 5 colors,  

                           1954 Enamel on Masonite,                                                                              1954 Enamel on Masonite,                        

                           30¾ x 24¼ in., 78 x 61,7 cm.                                                                            28¾ x 21¼ in., 73 x 54 cm.

We present two brightly colored enamel on board (one with an irregular shape), and two canvas paintings by Antonio Llorens, an Argentine artist and graphic designer who worked with the Madí in Buenos Aires and then settled in Montevideo, where he died in 1995.  The precision and energy of his graphic designs successfully translated to canvas and Masonite panels.  

                                                              

                      Antonio Llorens: Black & White, ca. 1970                                                              Antonio Llorens: Prism, ca.1983         

                      Oil on canvas, 45¾ x 34⅞ in., 116 x 88,5 cm.                                      Acrylic on canvas, 36¼ x 36¼ in., 92 x 92 cm.       

               

1956 María Freire exhibition, MAM, Sâo Paulo, Brazil

Antonio Llorens, María Freire, her husband José Pedro Costigliolo, and Rhod Rothfuss, a leader of the Madí, created Arte No-Figurativo (1952), a short lived group of hard edge formalism.  They paired geometric form with modern materials in bright vibrant colors that reveal their concern to preserve the purity and refinement of the work characterized by an almost mechanical technique.  

                                            

       José Pedro Costigliolo: Composición 111, 1954                                                       María Freire Untitled, ca.1956

       36 x 23 inches.                                                                                                       Tempera on board, 13¾ x 10½ in., 35 x 26 cm.

Striking examples are Costigliolo’s fired enamel on steel panels that evoke an industrial aesthetic, and many works by Freire of this period look at first glance like screen prints, only to discover that they are in fact hand painted with gouaches.

                                                                                                   

                María Freire: Abstraction, ca.1953  Iron, 75in. H                                              Composition, 1972  Tempera, ink on paper,                   

                                                                                                                                                   27¼ x 19½ in., 70 x 50 cm

María Freire’s 1953 sculpture is a drawing in air, a single line made of a forged iron rod.  According to Gabriel Pérez Barreiro, unlike many artists working in geometric abstraction at the time, Freire’s sculpture evolves in a sinuous and suggestive rhythm while never abandoning simplicity of construction.  

While these artists adopted a language derived from Max Bill and Suprematism, at the Taller Torres-García, artists pursued a painterly abstraction rooted in the long tradition of geometry found in archaic cultures and tribal art.

Horacio Torres: Forms Within a Structure, 1959  Oil on board, 31¾ x 41 in., 80 x 104 cm.

Although structure was the backbone of their paintings, it is not visible in Horacio Torres’ 1959 oil on paperboard where a black line meanders in wave like curves and spirals.  But in this apparently free form composition there is an underlying structure that the artist erased, leaving only the points where the orthogonal lines crossed.  Those points mark the places the line follows, stops, turns and coils, creating an enigmatic and sensuous abstraction like no other similar example, with its subtle suggestion of volume that recedes and swells.

Until now, critics and art historians have for the most part treated North and South American modernism as separate movements, the exhibition at the Newark Museum is the first to open up the discussion of abstraction in the Americas as a unified front and to consider what artists in the North and the South shared in their efforts to forge an indigenous abstract art.  As Tricia Laughlin Bloom wrote in the Museum’s catalogue, the exhibition “traces similarities in compositional structure, materials, techniques, and a common language of linear designs and geometric patterning, as a fuller picture emerges of this foundational period in modern art.” 

Geometric art has continued to evolve, proving it is a vibrant language with endless possibilities as the works presented here so eloquently demonstrate.