"Abstract Art from the Rio de la Plata" at the Americas Society - New York - Brief Article

Art in America, May, 2002 by Edward Leffingwell

In spite of the hostile cultural environment of the 1930s, the Rio de la Plata region of Uruguay and Argentina developed an avant-garde committed to abstraction and modern social ideas. Rigorously conceived, "Abstract Art from the Rio de la Plata: Buenos Aires and Montevideo, 1933-1953" tracked the emergence of Latin American abstraction through the work of artists active in that region.

Having perceived a universality of experience in the architectural foundations of Constructivist art, Joaquin Torres-Garcia returned from Europe to Monte-video in 1934 envisioning a school inspired by the international avant-garde. Sharing his commitment to the avant-garde were the European-born painter and sculptor Juan Del Prete and Esteban Lisa, an educator and artist who refused to exhibit during his lifetime. The small, planar abstractions of Lisa's "Composicions" from 1935 to the mid-1940s seem to tilt and float; robustly architectural by contrast, Torres-Garcia's abstractions of the 1930s influenced the work of a generation to come.

A group of artists with roots in the European avant-garde experience, aware of Constructivist, Cubist, Futurist and Dada concerns, found common cause in the utopian magazine Arturo, published in 1944. Leftist by disposition, directed against representational art and the romanticism of its expression, Arturo provided a kind of platform or rallying point for a manifesto of austere formal invention. Arturo supported the idea of the shaped canvas and served as a seedbed for the Arte Concreto-Invencion and Madi movements of 1945 and '46. Among the works by Arturo artists included in the show were Carmelo Arden Quin's cool, elegant sculpture of interpenetrating planes of wood, glass and Bakelite, Escultura blanca transformable (1946), conceived as an abstract painting and translated into pure icon. Interpenetrating abstract forms enliven the surface of Lidy Prati's Pintura Concret A4 (1948) and Alfred Hilto's Ritmos cromaticos II (1947). Thin black and yellow lines seem to slice into the deep green surface of Tomas Maldonado's untitled work of 1946, sending monochrome planes of color wheeling into deepest space.

The artists associated with Perceptismo, including Prati, called for the revaluation of the wall as field. One of the movement's founders, Raul Lozza, was represented by Invencion No. 150 (1948), which involves shapes deployed on the intermediary support of a panel as temporary surrogate for the wall itself, with a deep blue enameled surface offering the luminosity of a monochrome encaustic.

In the lively and complex publication for the exhibition, the curators pronounced the Rio de la Plata the epicenter of Latin American abstract art, with only a footnote to acknowledge the appearance of geometric abstraction in Brazil as early as the 1920s. In any case, the intellectual rigor of this investigation into the history of the avant-garde in the region and the quality of work included cries out for a series of exhibitions, beginning with the work of Torres-Garcia, to familiarize a larger audience with the achievements of these courageously independent artists. The Americas Society's project begins to fulfill the need for such carefully focused shows suggested by the evidence of the Museum of Modern Art's encyclopedic 1993 "Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century."