Cecilia de Torres, Ltd.

North and South Connected: Abstraction of The Americas 1998 Autumn



North and South Connected: An Abstraction of The Americas

This survey illuminates the unfolding of an abstract art that emerged in North & South America from a cross-fertilization with the indigenous arts. The exhibition juxtaposes the work of artists involved in the search for a modern American rooted art and ancient Andean textiles.

In the mid-thirties, Joaquín Torres-García and two transplanted Europeans, Josef and Anni Albers, led the way in searching for structural as well as symbolic principles in the art of the pre-Columbian peoples. The younger Adolph Gottlieb followed suit in the forties, a decade during which some of Torres-García's disciples; Francisco Matto and Gonzalo Fonseca, travelled through the Andean region in order to study the ancient arts and architecture. Louise Nevelson travelled in the fifties to Mexico and Guatemala to see the Maya stelae first hand, while Maya architecture and astronomical lore was also part of Alfred Jensen's complex intellectual background. Lifelong abstractionists like Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar in Colombia and the Argentines Alfredo Puente and César Paternosto also reoriented their work as they encountered the indigenous arts.

The uncompromising geometry of the ancient Andean textiles in the exhibition - a superb selection from the Andrés Moraga Gallery in Berkeley, California - exemplify the textile paradigm, a grid that precedes by millenia the modernist grid of our century. The exhibition presents the woven masterpieces as paragons of abstraction on a par with the work of artist-weavers Anni Albers and Lenore Tawney, with abstract, grid-based painting and with Cecilia Vicuña' s expansion of weaving into space.

César Paternosto, the curator, is the author of The Stone and the Thread-Andean Roots of Abstract Art (University of Texas Press, 1996). Lucy R. Lippard, has called him "an intellectual visionary." In Overlay (Pantheon Press, 1983) she said of his work: "[it] consists of monochromatic abstract paintings in dense, glowing earth colors, which incorporate some of the principles and geometric symbols (notably the stepped inverted pyramid) of the pre-Columbian sites with which he is intellectually obsessed."

The gallery that Cecilia de Torres opened in 1993 has been a leader in broadening the perspective on Latin American art for North American audiences. Ms. de Torres's expertise in the art and artists of the Constructivist school established by Joaquín Torres-García has led to numerous museum and gallery exhibitions over the past several years.

"The New York Times" Review

"Art Nexus" Review

"The New Yorker" Review

"The Review" Review

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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