Cecilia de Torres, Ltd.

Square Roots 2000 Winter



Square Roots: Paul Bowen, Eduardo Costa, Liz Deschenes, César Paternosto, David Cabrera, Marta Chilindron, MP Landis, Ladd Spiegel

Recalling the square, our modern art-historical memory delves back to Mondrian's pilgrimage from nature to the Neoplastic and Malevich's archetypal Suprematist icons. Drifting onward along time's line, we unearth Albers' mid-century series, "Homage to the Square," and a vast sweep of color fields. And in more recent recesses, the mind most likely alights on one or another Minimalist slab. The square - on the surface so very simple, with its four sides of equal length, four angles of equal degree - has served the twentieth century's artists graciously, comprising and conveying manifold meanings just by being its ever-accommodating self.

In its more recent incarnations, this repository, like any malleable entity, has perhaps suffered at the hands of its interpreters. Emerging in the infancy of abstraction as a lofty conduit to metaphysical consciousness, a cipher of the fourth dimension, the square becomes, by the 1960s, an emblem of the prefabricated industrial object, a cold symbol of Carl Andre's "significant blankness," a tabula rasa forbidden inscription. What woeful injustice for the shape the ancients imbued with the power to fend off plagues, the shape from which the logarithmic spiral of shells and celestial nebulae springs, the shape that, given three dimensions, promised protection from a deluge of evils, until Pandora lost her will.

It is a vital pleasure, then, to find the square, of late stripped bare, redeemed in "Square Roots," an exhibition of painting and sculpture by eight contemporary artists who reinfuse the quadrilateral (a few rectangles sneak in) with history, humanity, tactility, and spirituality. Ladd Spiegel, curator, is the second of Cecilia de Torres' artists to present a show contextualizing a loose family of Constructivist-inspired artists.

[Excerpt from the essay: Square Roots: Contemporary Quadrilateral Literalism with Heart by Jennifer Liese, editor of Provincetown Arts magazine.]

Full essay by Jennifer Liese

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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Eduardo Costa

Eduardo Costa is an Argentine artist who lived twenty-five years in the US and four in Brazil. He started his career in Buenos Aires as part of the Di Tella generation and continued to work in NYC, where he made a strong contribution to the local avant-garde. He collaborated with American artists Vito Acconci, Scott Burton, John Perreault and Hannah Weiner, among others. In Brazil, he participated in projects organized by Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Antonio Manuel, Lygia Clark, and others from the school of Rio. His work has been discussed in Art in America, Art Forum, and in the main books on conceptual art: A. Alberro, MIT, 1999; P. Osborne, Phaedon, 2002; Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea, Yale/Houston Museum of Art, 2004; Inés. Katzenstein, MoMA, New York, 2004, Luis Pérez- Oramas and others, San Antonio Museum of Art, 2004; Luis Camnitzer, University of Texas, 2007, among others. Eduardo Costa ́s work has been exhibited at the New Museum, New York; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Queens Museum of Art, Queens, New York; List Art Center, Boston; Miami Art Museum, Walker Art Center, Minnesota, MOMA, Buenos Aires; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, among others. A current project is to manufacture 30 Duchamp/Costa bicycles inspired by a 1980 model, for an exhibition on Duchamp-based work curated by Jessica Morgan (Tate Modern) for the Jumex Foundation in Mexico City. 


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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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