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

Born in Argentina in 1931, César Paternosto has exhibited widely internationally.  From 1967 to 2005, he worked in New York as a painter, sculptor, author and curator.  His works are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City; Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y.; Menil Collection, Houston, Texas; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina; among many others.

Since he began working as an artist in the early 1960s, César Paternosto has been in the vanguard of abstraction in Latin America.  An expert on the symbolic systems of Pre-Columbian civilizations, Paternosto has used his own photography and drawings to document and analyze the ancient remains of the region.  This research was published in The Stone and The Thread - Andean Roots of Abstract Art, University of Texas Press in 1996. Paternosto's exploration of Amerindian abstraction fueled his artistic work over thirty years.

In 1998, César Paternosto curated for Cecilia de Torres, Ltd. the ground breaking exhibition and catalogue: North and South Connected: An Abstraction of The Americas, which explored abstraction in Amerindian art and chronicled its influence on 20th Century artists (Albers, Gottlieb, Nevelson, Torres-García, etc.).  That exhibition was expanded by Paternosto into the major survey, Abstraction: The Amerindian Paradigm, for the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels and that traveled to the IVAM in Valencia, Spain, with over 160 works of modern art and ancient textiles, ceramics and objects.

In the spring of 2002, Paternosto's works on paper, from the 1960s to then, were exhibited at the Drawing Center in New York.  In 2004, he had a retrospective at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, in Segovia, Spain where he moved in 2005. 

The 2007 exhibition High Times Hard Times New York Painting 1967-1975, included his 1969 side-painted work ElSur.  Paternosto’s 2006 three-panel Ritmos Verticales II, was part of the Smithsonian Institute’s Southern Identity – Contemporary Argentine Art exhibition in Washington in 2010.

In 2010, the Spanish architect Rafael Moneo commissioned Paternosto for a pictorial intervention to the new arrivals hall of Atocha, the main rail station in Madrid.  The result echoes Paternosto’s side-painted canvases across a 170-foot span of steel.


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