Argentine artifice - Argentinian painters

Art in America, Sept, 1995 by Alisa Tager

Miguel Harte (b. Buenos Aires, 1961) leaves the techniques of painting even further behind in his multimedium compositions. Harte revels in the artificial. He uses Formica that looks like marble or wood, and he melts resin so that it suggests pools of rippling water. His paintings are almost entirely abstract, although he often places a miniature face or eyebafl somewhere within the composition. In one piece from 1991, he painted a bright blue eyeban on an eggshen which was broken and scattered across a fake granite plane, and in a 1992 work he put a little painting of a science-fiction head in a bubble of clear resin, cast afloat in a sea of opalescent blue plastic.

Although only a few adventurous collectors buy contemporary art in Argentina, there's promise in the quantity of interesting work being made and the increasing number of available venues. Several critics at prominent newspapers support these exhibition spaces and these individual artists, many of whom have participated in group shows outside of Argentina (Trigo has had two solos in New York). Artists in Buenos Aires are very well informed about art outside their country's borders, and slowly their own art is coming to be known abroad.

Author: Alisa Tager is a writer and curator who lives in Los Angeles.