Cecilia de Torres, Ltd.
Works ON & OF Paper - Modern and Contemporary 2005 Autumn
Works ON & OF Paper - Modern and Contemporary
Cecilia de Torres, Ltd. presents works of paper by 33 modern and contemporary artists that exemplify the infinite possibilities of the medium. A selection of diverse styles that date from 1936 to the present includes fine line figure drawings, writings, collages of multicolor paper, stitching with charcoal blackened thread, ink stains, digital prints, 1950s geometric abstractions, painterly temperas, graphisms, cut-out paper sculpture, and mobiles. The exhibition installation presents four aspects: painterly, geometric, sculptural and textual.
The first impressions of New York by José Gurvich date to 1971, when the artist moved from Israel to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. These sketches are the unique vision of the diverse aspects of City life from the perspective of an outsider; detailed renderings of trashcans, sign posts, and symbols of America, like the rubbing of a Kennedy half dollar coin and the American flag. Lidya Buzio’s characteristic buildings, rendered here in ink & watercolor, bring a witty view of Downtown Manhattan.
Manuel Pailós and Inés Bancalari exhibit portraits and figure studies in fine ink lines.
In a letter dated December 31, 1947, by Joaquín Torres-García, writing and drawing are seamlessly integrated by the uniformly strong emphasis of line and text. Luis Fernando Roldán colors with graphite the thread he uses to write with stitches; an Untitled 1966 lithograph made at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop represents the work Gego made while she was in Los Angeles. Gego, who explored the expressive potential of line, here invests it with an enigmatic and irreverent character by intersecting a field of parallel lines with irregular marks.
"We show two examples from the series titled Vestiges, by Ana María Maiolino where she worked with ink lines, drops and stains. According to the artist, they were done with a minimum of material presence, they are like "a breath, an aspiration of life, just enough to register my inner impulse.” Two 1936 ink drawings of geometric shapes interspersed with written words by Héctor Ragni antecede León Ferrari's "calligraphic drawings," where the distinction between writing and drawing is erased, his tangled scrawls imbue calligraphy with new meaning. They were intended as a form of political denunciation capable of evading censorship and reprisal during Argentina's military dictatorship.
The poet and artist Cecilia Vicuna generously lent us the original manuscript for her recently published book Instan. Vicuna’s unique way of combining drawing and writing: lines that turn into words and in turn unraveled words reveal their inner associations, allowing metaphors and hidden meanings contained in them to come to light. Marco Maggi draws in the thinnest pencil lines, aerial views of impossible city maps, infinitesimal and undecipherable.
In the geometric and painterly category, three artists from Uruguay: Antonio Llorens, Amalia Nieto, and María Freire, represent 1950s geometric abstractions.
Gustavo Serra paints mysterious interiors; Juan Iribarren's gouaches are all about light, each one of the vertical brushstrokes is a gesture that records a specific tone and color of light-shadow bands reflected on a wall. The different viscosities of the layered gouache accents generate a system of fractured edges and of color pools.
César Paternosto returned in 1996 to an old idea; softening the rhythmic color lines done with watercolor pencil by going over them with a wet brush, hence the title created by the poet Cecilia Vicuna for these elegant works: "Hilos de agua,"(Water Threads). Ladd Spiegel paints geometric shapes in black and white on a color field painted on old book pages. Through a thin layer of color, the print is slightly visible, providing metaphorically and literally, an underlying structuring. For Ana Tiscornia her "Homeless Sites" digital prints refer to forgetfulness and to the fact that memory has to be constantly adjusted. She draws architectural plans directly on the computer using Photoshop and Illustrator programs, to which she adds transparent layers of corrections, as she records the sites where a homeless person settled and later moved.
Luis Lizardo and Marta Chilindron use paper as volume, Lizardo rips bits of paper strips that are woven with nylon filament in a hanging aerial sculpture. Chilindron’s colored paper Still Life becomes volumetric, as each flat element is unfolded. Ernesto Villa recreated within a box, the effect of paper blown by the wind in refuse dumps, where the eye catches glimpses of celebrity figures among the kaleidoscope of debris.
The Constructivist tradition is represented by Taller Torres-García artist Julio Alpuy; a Christmas Day drawing by Francisco Matto; early abstractions by Augusto Torres who with Carmelo de Arzadun were members of the important modernist group the Association of Constructivist Art that in the 1930s produced in Montevideo some of the earliest geometric abstractions in the Americas. An early ink & wash structure by Gonzalo Fonseca prefigures by many years his later stone sculptures.
Joaquín Torres-García 1874 - 1949
On April 30, 1934, when he arrived in Montevideo after forty-three years of absence, Torres-García told the press that he had returned to Uruguay in order to "develop a wide range of activities, to lecture, to teach courses, to achieve... on walls what I have already achieved on canvas,... to create in Montevideo a movement that will surpass the art of Paris."
"... the moral zeal and joy in art making that Torres-García inculcated in his students, gives evidence of what a vibrant creation Latin American modernism was. It was technically at least as accomplished as its counterpart in the pre-Abstract Expressionist New York of the 30's and 40's, but improved upon it in one crucial respect: it transformed a borrowed European style into one deeply expressive of a New World culture. By Torres-García's standards, the work produced by El Taller was the genuine utopian article, and for anyone interested in modernism today, it is certainly an art to be reckoned with."
Holland Cotter, The New York Times, December 4, 1992
Since he had emigrated to Spain before his seventeenth birthday, he had no family ties in his native country. Nevertheless, Torres' declarations revealed a clear and ambitious plan. This was no passing visit; there was something definitive in his words that indicated that his return had been a deliberate act.
After a long development, during which his painting evolved from the Mediterranean classicism of his Barcelona frescoes of 1913 and passed through periods of Vibrationism, Cubism, and Fauvism, it culminated in 1929 in what was to become his characteristic incorporation of symbols into a geometric grid based on the golden section.
For Torres-García, the symbol was a way of synthesizing idea and form while bypassing narrative, which would interfere with the unity of the work. He called this conjunction of idea and form the nexus between the vital (or living) and the abstract. By inserting a symbol representing humanistic values into the antithetical rational structure of neoplasticism (which was devoid of human references), Torres succeeded in creating a style that constituted a major contribution to modern art. He called it Constructive Universalism.
What Torres-García envisioned as the new art for the Americas would encompass all expressions from architecture to the most humble utilitarian object. This was not an American version of the Russian constructivist movement or the Bauhaus; his aim was to create a modern art for the new continent equal in scope to the art of the greatest civilizations of antiquity. The uniqueness of Torres' proposal consisted of his incorporation of essential elements of indigenous American art into the basic principles of European constructivism and geometric abstraction.
His conception of art had a metaphysical and spiritual dimension - a faith in the spiritual value of art as a creative act bound to a universal law - and - in the independent existence of a work of art, apart from its naturalistic contents.
[Excerpted from the essay by Cecilia de Torres in El Taller Torres-García, The School of the South and Its Legacy, University of Texas Press, 1992.]
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Inés Bancalari
Inés Bancalari was born in Buenos Aires in 1946. She graduated as valedictorian from the Superior School of Fine Arts Prilidiano Pueyrredón, with a professor's degree in painting. She also studied under Masters Robert Beverly Hale and Frank Mason at the Art Students League, New York, USA, Aurelio Macchi and Luis Barragán. In 1988 Gaglianone Art Editions published the book Inés Bancalari 1976-1987, with a critical appraisal by Rafael Squirru. In 2002 the book “Bancalari, paintings and collages” was published with critical appraisals by Nelly Perazzo, Juan Manuel Bonet, Marcos Barnatan and an interview by Cecilia de Torres.
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Lidya Buzio
Sculptor of painted surfaces, for over thirty years Buzio has created abstract volumes and cityscapes. Working conceptually she creates the sculptural form that best address the tonal coloring or landscape that she will paint. Buzio’s ceramic sculptures twist and juxtapose the structure and light of New York.
Buzio’s work is in the Painting & Sculpture Collections of the Brooklyn Museum & the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; in the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Fine Arts Museums; Nelson-Atkins; Everson; Victoria & Albert, London; Taiwan National Museum; and many other museums and private collections, internationally.
A catalogue of her work with an essay by Garth Clark and an extensive chronology is in preparation.
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María Freire
María Freire is one of the Southern Cone's most productive and engaged, if also one of the least-known, artists working in the Constructivist tradition. Freire trained at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Montevideo from 1938 to 1943, studying under José Cuneo and Severino Pose and at the Universidad del Trabajo under Antonio Pose. Her first sculptures indicate the profound influence of African art on her work, something of an anomaly for an artist in South America at that time. In the early 1950s, after meeting her future husband, the artist José Pedro Costigliolo, her art became more influenced by European non-figurative art, such as Art Concret group, Georges Vantongerloo, and Max Bill. In 1952 she co-founded the Arte No-Figurativo group with Costigliolo in Montevideo, and exhibited with them in 1952 and 1953. Freire exhibited regularly in the National Salons from 1953 to 1972. In 1953 Freire and Costigliolo were invited to the 2nd Sao Paulo Biennial, where they came into contact with Brazil's enthusiasm for geometric abstraction. In 1957 Freire and Costigliolo won the “Gallinal” travel grant which they used to live and study in Paris and Amsterdam, and to travel throughout Europe until 1960, meeting many of the historical pioneers of abstract art, including Antoine Pevsner and Georges Vantongerloo. In 1959 they exhibited in Brussels, at the Galerie Contemporain. She was invited again to the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1957 and the XXXIII Venice Biennale in 1966.
Freire developed her work within a strict, yet variable formal vocabulary, often switching between periods of greater or lesser degrees of abstraction. Her series Sudamérica, worked on from 1958 to 1960, employed cut planes and polygonal forms in a reduced palette. Freire taught drawing in an Architecture Prep School and wrote art criticism for the journal “Acción” from 1962 to 1973. Around 1960, she began to experiment with looser forms of abstraction, and a more expressive range of colors, resulting in her series Capricorn and Cordoba, 1965-1975, and later on she would create volumetric disturbances by dividing the surface with repeated forms or by creating chromatic modulation sequences in her series Variantes y Vibrantes, 1975-1985. In 2000, she began to produce large-scale public sculpture in Uruguay.
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Julio Alpuy
American, born in Tacuarembó, Uruguay, 1919. Lived in New York City from 1961 until his death in 2009.
Introduced to Joaquín Torres-García in 1940, Alpuy joined his atelier and in 1943, began teaching at the TTG under Torres-García’s direction. In 1944, Alpuy painted two Constructivist Murals for the Saint Bois Hospital, one now at the College of Architecture. In 1949, he executed several mural commissions in mosaic for the architects Leborgne and De Leone and for Torres-García’s home. In 1950s, interspersed by trips to Europe, the Middle East and Chile, and two years in Bogotá and Caracas, Alpuy continued to teach at the El Taller and work professionally. He executed a series of large mural paintings for the architect Payssé Reyes, the Larrañaga Lyceum and for the YMCA headquarters in Montevideo.
In 1961, Alpuy immigrated to New York City, where he died in 2009. He received a 1961 Fellowship from The New School for Social Research. Alpuy was awarded a mural commission for the new Uruguayan Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1980, and received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1983), the New York Council for the Arts (1986), and the Gottlieb Foundation (1990). Alpuy has had numerous one-person exhibitions and participated in numerous group shows for nearly sixty years. In 1999, the Municipal government in Montevideo honored Alpuy with a retrospective exhibition that then traveled to Buenos Aires. Alpuy’s work is in major public and private collections internationally.
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Antonio Llorens
Antonio Llorens was a student at the Círculo de Bellas Artes, Montevideo and became a member of the MADÍ group during the 1940s. Also a founder of the Uruguayan Group of Abstract Art, his work was in numerous exhibitions of the MADÍ group including the important 1958 Parisian MADÍ International, Groupe Argentine at the Galerie Denis René; the 1961 15 Years of MADÍ Art, Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires; Vanguardias de la década de los 40, Arte MADÍ Perceptismo, Museo Sivori, Buenos Aires in 1980; the 2001 Abstract Art From the Rio de la Plata, 1930s to 1950, Americas Society, New York and Tamayo Museum, Mexico City.
Llorens was an influential proponent of geometric and abstract art in Uruguay. He was commissioned to paint public and private murals, taught from 1962 to 1972 at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Montevideo, and in 1987 was awarded the National Prize Pintura INCA in Montevideo. Llorens work is in the prestigious Blaquier Collection, the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, the Cisneros Collection in Caracas, Venezuela, and the CIFO collection in Miami, among others.
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Gonzalo Fonseca
Born in Montevideo in 1922, Fonseca traveled frequently to Europe with his family visiting museums and archeological sites that made a great impression on him. At 15, he learned to sculpt in stone. In 1939, Fonseca enrolled in the College of Architecture of Montevideo, but by 1942, he abandoned his architectural studies and joined the Taller Torres-García. Along with Jonio Montiel, Sergio de Castro and Julio Alpuy in 1945, he traveled through Argentina, Peru and Bolivia to study pre-Columbian art. In 1950, Fonseca moved to Paris, then Rome in 1951. He traveled through North Africa and the Middle East where he joined in excavations directed by Petrie Flinters. Living in Madrid in 1953, Fonseca studied ceramics at Rosedal - La Moncloa and met the Spanish sculptor Jorge de Oteiza. In 1956, he returned to Montevideo and in 1958, moved to New York. In 1970, Fonseca began working in Italy, near Carrara, on large marble pieces. Fonseca lived and worked in New York and Seravezza, Italy. He died in Italy, June 11, 1997.
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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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José Gurvich
Born in Lithuania, 1927; died in New York, 1974.
A violin student along with Horacio, the younger son of Torres-García, Gurvich studied with Torres-García and was a part of the Taller Torres-García until 1962. He spent several years on an Israeli kibbutz and traveled in France and Italy before settling in New York in 1970. Gurvich achieved a unique style as well as technical mastery. His work is populated with figures and images that combine the iconography of his Jewish upbringing, the formative years with Torres-García, his great admiration for Breughel and Bosch and a life spent in Montevideo, Israel and New York.
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Francisco Matto
Born 1911 and died 1995 in Montevideo, Uruguay
Privately tutored and a child painter, Matto at age 21, traveled to Tierra del Fuego and acquired the first Pre-Columbian pieces of what was to become a major collection and an important influence on his art. Matto met Torres-García in 1939, joining his atelier and exhibiting with the artists of the Taller Torres-García until the 1960s. An elegant, aristocratic man, Matto worked with humble materials, preferring cardboard to canvas and found pieces of wood for his sculptures. His work has been exhibited at the Sálon des Surindépendants, Paris; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; in Spain, Italy, Germany, Moscow, Tokyo, New York and throughout Latin America. Matto's monumental concrete sculptures are landmarks in Punta del Este, Uruguay.
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Manuel Pailós
Born in Galicia, Spain, in 1918 his family immigrated to Uruguay in 1920 and settled in Montevideo. Pailós studied at the Circulo de Bellas Artes with Guillermo Laborde and José Cuneo and at an art exhibition in 1942, he met Torres-García and was invited to visit T-G’s studio. In 1943, he joined the Taller Torres-García and continued working and teaching in the Taller’s workshop school through the 1960s. In 1968, he won the First Prize for Sculpture in the Salón nacional de artes plásticas. Pailós has created many cement reliefs for private and public spaces and his sculptures grace many of Montevideo’s parks and plazas. He has shown extensively throughout Latin America and in 1991 was honored by the Spanish regional government of Galicia with an exhibition in Santiago de Compostela and the commission of a granite sculpture for the gardens of its University. In 2004, the artist passed away in Montevideo.
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León Ferrari
León Ferrari was born in Buenos Aires, 1920. He was awarded the 2007 Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale. Ferrari is a multi-faceted artist of great technical skill and conceptual prowess. Recent years have brought him great regard from the international art community and prices for his work have soared.
“León Ferrari’s vibrant and challenging work is conversant with poetry, explores enigmas and metaphors, comments on space and form, creates music, can depict improbable cities and impugn religious and military institutions that monopolize ‘the revealed truth.’
“Ferrari’s reputation and international recognition began less than ten years ago when his work was included in the 2000-survey exhibition ‘Heterotopias’ at the Centro Reina Sofía in Madrid, and... The national scandal brought on by attempts to censure his retrospective exhibition at the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires in 2004, ...
“Today, his ink drawings, collages, sculptures, heliographies, Braille-embossed photographs, objects and installations are all critically acclaimed and in worldwide demand. Ferrari is still active, sharp, working daily and enjoying a fertile creative period as well as experiencing great personal success.”
Victoria Verlichak, 2007, from "Serie de Errores & Works 1962-2007"
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Héctor Ragni
1897, Buenos Aires, Argentina - 1952, Montevideo, Uruguay
Ragni´s family moved to Montevideo in 1915 where Héctor continued his art studies and activities. In 1918, Ragni sailed for Europe, living in Barcelona and returning to Uruguay after ten years abroad. In 1934, Ragni met Torres-García and joined the Asociación de Arte Constructivo. Active in the artistic and cultural movements of the time and a participant in the numerous exhibitions of the AAC and later the Taller Torres-García, Ragni had a strong graphic sense coupled with superb technical mastery. His line drawings are highly coveted as there are few canvases extant.
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Augusto Torres
Born in Tarrasa, Cataluña, 1913; died in Barcelona, 1992.
The first son of Torres-García, Augusto grew up primarily in Italy and France. In 1927, the family shared a house with the painter Jean Hélion, who inspired Augusto in his passion for collecting North African and American Indian art. Hired by the Musée de l’Homme to document their Pre-Columbian pottery, he studied tribal and primitive art. In the early 1930s, Augusto was an apprentice to the sculptor Julio González and studied drawing in Amedée Ozenfant’s academy. After Torres-García brought his family to Uruguay in 1934, Augusto participated in all the activities of his father’s teaching atelier, the Taller Torres-García. Throughout his life, Augusto traveled widely; including two years living in New York City, a recipient of a New School grant. From 1973 on, he divided his time between Barcelona and Montevideo. An inspirational teacher, he instructed several of today’s fine young artists.
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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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2011 Autumn
Augusto Torres - Paintings and Drawings 1940-1980
2010 Autumn
Bright Geometry
2010 Summer
Painted Ideas
2009 Autumn
Writings
2009 Spring - Summer
Inés Bancalari - New Paintings and Collages 2004-2007
2008 Autumn - Winter
León Ferrari - Serie de Errores and Works 1962-2006
2007 Winter - 2008 Spring
Line - Plane - Volume / Sculpture: 1944-2006
2006 Winter
José Gurvich - Americas Society exhibition
2005 Autumn
Inés Bancalari - Paintings and Collages
2004 Autumn
Marta Chilindron - Recent Works
2004 Spring
Julio Alpuy - Works of Wood and Drawings 1960-2003
2003 Autumn
Homage Geometria Sensível - 25 Years Later
2003 Spring - Summer
Modernism: Montevideo & Buenos Aires 1930-1960
2001 - 2002 Winter
César Paternosto - WHITE/RED
2001 Autumn
A Latin American Metaphysical Perspective
2000 Autumn
José Gurvich - Paintings and Drawings
2000 Summer
Square Roots
2000 Winter
Francisco Matto - Portraits, Totems and Graphisms
1999 Autumn
Joaquín Torres-García - 50th Commemorative Exhibition
1999 Summer
North and South Connected: Abstraction of The Americas
1998 Autumn
Four Artists: Constructivist Roots
1998 Summer
Julio Alpuy - Journeys on Paper
1997 Autumn
Marta Chilindron - Dimensions
1997 Spring
The Still Life
1996 Spring
65 Years of Constructivist Wood: 1930-1995
1995 Autumn
Joaquín Torres-García - 1874-1949
1995 Summer
César Paternosto - Paintings, Sculpture & Works on Paper
1995 Spring
José Gurvich - 1927-1974
1994 Winter
Julio Alpuy - Works 1963-1993
1994 Summer
Francisco Matto - Works 1944-1992
1993 Autumn