Cecilia de Torres, Ltd.

Four Artists: Constructivist Roots 1998 Summer



Four Artists: Constructivist Roots

Marta Chilindron, Caio Fonseca, Sergio Gutman, Ladd Spiegel

The common thread that intimately connects these four artists is their early contact with painters who studied with Joaquín Torres-García in his Taller in Montevideo during the 1940s. This "third generation" carries his teachings into new territories, confirming the validity of his theories.

Marta Chilindron and Ladd Spiegel studied with Julio Alpuy in his New York studio. Alpuy had been personally instructed by Torres-García in his methods for the teaching of drawing and painting, which emphasized the underlying structure and geometry. Caio Fonseca and Sergio Gutman both studied in Barcelona with Augusto Torres, the elder son of Torres-García and a great painter in his own right. Fonseca, the son of the renowned sculptor Gonzalo Fonseca, another key member of Torres-García's Taller, grew up surrounded by Constructivist art.

Marta Chilindron will show her new "Pop-out" sculptures which manipulate space through the action of opening and closing. The 8 x 8 x 8-foot work on exhibition creates its shape by opening from a compressed state so highly charged that it literally has to expand out into space. This work and the accompanying maquettes, made in non-traditional materials, evolve from flatness into volume; the planes advance into three dimensions and then collapse upon themselves again.

Caio Fonseca's work shows his vast knowledge of the craft of painting and his regard for a rigorous harmonic order. His passion for music and its close affinity with painting in its structure and lyricism is evident in these works. "My painting is flat," Fonseca says, "and its elements functional and concrete. It is tone which transforms the real world into relations of planes and color. As I adjust and readjust these vocabularies of color and form hundreds of times, the painting acquires a rhythm."

Sergio Gutman's totemic wood constructions and paintings are austere, yet earthy in color. The scaffold-like lines in his canvases, and the delicately drawn wires he uses in his sculpture, create rhythmic accents and counterpoints to the form and texture of his work emphasizing the underlying geometry. Gutman, who lives in Mexico, has devised an approach that has strong antecedents within the heritage of his teaching, yet is distinctly his own.

Ladd Spiegel draws inspiration from two sources: basic geometric forms and the apparent randomness of play. His constructions, crudely made of rough painted wood and methodically carved pegs, are based on board games and toys. Lacking rules, the works leave the viewer with no alternative to creating intuitive and abstract patterns. Spiegel's influences, in addition to the Taller artists, include Minimalism, Zen Buddhism, and folk and tribal art.

"The Review" Review

Marta Chilindron

Chilindron was born in Argentina and raised in Uruguay, in 1969 she moved to New York where she received a BFA from the State University of New York.

Since the beginning of her career, Chilindron has focused on issues of space, time, and perspective. In her early sculpture she altered the shape of basic furniture to reflect her point of view in relation to her body in real space. In her first solo show in the Gallery in 1997, Chilindron further explored the treatment of furniture by compressing the depth of the stylized shapes of a table, a chair and a sideboard made of white enameled wood, while leaving the height and width untouched. Her first collapsible piece, made in 1998, was of a table and chair, cut out of Gatorboard that materialize in the third dimension when opened. Cinema Kinesis was her first large moving work, commissioned by El Museo del Barrio in 1999, of a movie theatre that opened and collapsed powered by a motor. In 2000 she started working with transparent and color acrylics.

She was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, the Anonymous Was a Woman prize, a Joan Mitchell Award, and a Civitella Ranieri Artist Residency in Umbria, Italy. Invited to participate in many group shows: Exit Art-New York, CIFO-Miami, MoLAA-Long Beach, Haus Konstruktif-Zurich; and solo shows in Doha, Quatar, Geneva, Miami, and Sâo Paulo. Her last public installation was for the Focus Lodz Biennal in Poland.


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Sergio Gutman

Sergio Gutman was born on 1960, in Mexico City. He is a Constructivist artist, distinguished from other contemporary abstractionists by his quest to integrate his deep spiritual convictions within the formal, plastic elements of his canvases and wood constructions.

Gutman aspires to go beyond the aesthetic; he wants his paintings to be "objects for meditation." For him, lines, colors, and pure abstract forms are related linearly, as letters are in words.

Gutman studied philosophy at the University of Mexico and art in Barcelona at the EINA Institute where he met the Catalan painters Rafols Casamada, Joseph Guinovart and Federic Amat, who had a strong influence on his work.  It was at the Cercle Artistic Sant Lluc, where in 1985 he took life-drawing classes that he met the young artist Bruno Fonseca, the first son of Gonzalo Fonseca, a painter and sculptor from Uruguay, who worked with Torres-García in the 1940's.

It is not a coincidence that he found the writings of Torres-García so akin to his tendencies.  Philosophy and art have been Gutman's main interests, yet it took him time and considerable struggle to bring them together. 

The construction of his own artistic identity and plastic language caused him to search through his cultural and religious heritage. He has succeeded in creating works that integrate the spiritual within a Constructivist oriented aesthetic.  Sergio Gutman brings new life to this valuable tradition.


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