Cecilia de Torres, Ltd.

César Paternosto - Paintings, Sculpture & Works on Paper 1995 Spring



César Paternosto - Paintings, Sculpture & Works on Paper

"Amidst today's visual noise, I search for silence. A moment of unity." - César Paternosto

"...Paternosto's most recent shaped canvases, incorporating their structures supports... are Constructivist in every sense and have themselves become iconic objects that pay homage to the spirit of Torres-García and to the ancient Peruvian symbolic forms."
- Barbara Braun, Pre-Columbian Art & the Post-Columbian World, 1993 Abrams

"The experience of standing in front of Paternosto's paintings lies somewhere between a confrontation of something that has virtually disappeared and of an infinite stillness, of a balance of forces between different planes, as if in reference to the landscape of the altiplano and sensation of continuity between earth and sky."
- Charles Merewether, Imaging Utopia, 1993

This exhibition at the Cecilia de Torres gallery was balanced at the artistic level and mature in personal terms... For a number of decades, Paternosto has been working the hard edge, hierarchizing the object-painting... He has placed symbolic Andean forms in his canvases, meditated on them and through form returned to his very marked contours... like the well preserved vestiges of the pre-Columbian architecture of some unknown civilization. The paintings of the portico series, in acrylic emulsion on canvas - sometimes including ground marble- and the small format sculptures and installations in pigmented cement which made up this show, were given museographical treatment in this very New York and Latin American gallery - with its open brickwork, impeccable walls, and very effective lighting.
(excerpted from the Art Nexus review by Graciela Kartofel, July, 1995).



César Paternosto

b. 1931 La Plata, Argentina - lives in Segovia, Spain

After beginning his career working in an informalist mode followed by a brief period of lyrical figuration, Paternosto began creating his first artworks based on geometric abstraction in the early 1960s.  Before the end of this decade, Paternosto's formal and theoretical explorations led him to push beyond the very boundaries of the medium of painting.  Leaving the surface of the canvas blank, Paternosto moved the emphasis of his artworks to their outer edges, converting his paintings into objects and  destroying the inherited tradition of  only viewing paintings frontally.  Since this breakthrough, Paternosto has remained on the vanguard of abstraction in both Latin America and New York, where he lived for over four decades. 

In addition to his career as a painter, Paternosto has studied Pre-Columbian art with academic rigor.  This expertise has not only influenced his artistic practices, but has also led Paternosto to assume scholarly and curatorial roles, including his notable work producing the internationally exhibited show, Abstraction: The Ameridian Paradigm.   In 2005, Paternosto moved to Segovia, Spain, where a major retrospective of his works had been celebrated a year previously at the Esteban Vicente Museum of Contemporary Art.  Paintings by Paternosto are included in such prestigious collections as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland; and the Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, German, among many others. 


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