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Lot Essay
"Man is the most important entity that I have before me," Deira once mused, acknowledging the utter seriousness with which he accorded the drama of the human condition.[1] A lawyer by training and mostly self-taught as an artist, Deira began painting in 1953 following a honeymoon trip to Europe, where he encountered works by Diego Velásquez, Francisco Goya, and Matthias Grünewald, among others. Drawing on the intense expressionism and darkly fatalistic humanism of Goya, in particular, he cultivated a practice that interrogated the tumultous and existential climate of the later 1950s and 1960s through the subjectivity of the human figure. Invited to join Argentina's short-lived but profoundly influential Otra Figuración group after a breakthrough exhibtion in 1960, Deira exhibited with Luis Felipe Noé, Rómulo Macció, and Jorge de la Vega between 1961 and 1965, sharing in the countercultural angst and painterly expressionism that defined their generation.
Deira painted sparingly between 1967 and 1975, and the self-portraits of 1968 suggest a pensive state of mind as he probed the philosophical underpinnings of painting and the complexities of self-expression. He had been awarded the prestigious Premio Palanza, Argentina's highest honor, in 1967, and the institutional consecration of his painting seems to have prompted new experimentation in his later work. The self-portraits, including the present Autorretrato, offer a penetrating glimpse into Deira's psyche, frequently mixing linguistic and figurative codes in images that communicate a clamorous, multiplex individuality. He explained his intention at the time of producing work "that provokes rejection, understanding, doubt, resistance, acceptance, discomfort, integration, or repulsion, that questions or responds, that looks at or is seen. A work, ultimately, of dynamic projection."[2] The agonistic duality that he describes is foregrounded in the self-portraits, in which he lays bare the cogitations of a questioning mind, playing the abstraction of word and image against the literality of their appearance.
Deira gazes obliquely outward in the present Autorretrato, only his face well defined within the disfiguring red cloak that engulfs his torso in wrinkled, semitransparent folds. An oversized gloved hand emerges uncannily from an avian-like hood, its fingers and dislocated thumb suggesting a hand-eye-mind analogy that stretches from the written text to the beak-like projection that frames the other side of Deira's face. Like Hay que fugarse de la realidad and Autorretrato (cada 2 x 3), two other self-portraits from the same year, the present work conflates image and text, characteristically here with suggestively scribbled words - "de arte," "lieron," "se dice" - circumscribing Deira's shrouded form. The words carry a strong graphic impact, the letters sometimes diffuse and other times unruly as Deira's script sprawls across the canvas in agitated and slanting lines. Yet the subjectivity of the text also harks back to Deira's philosophical reappraisal of what it meant to paint, an inquiry initiated as early as his 1964 series, En torno al pensamiento A, in which he explored the pre-verbal origins of thought ("A-thought") through the visual idiolect of his painting. Deira's self-portraits weave these ontological questions of painting into deeply introspective images that pry open the foundations of his self-identity, here ruminatively and dramatically figured in the red, amorphous body silhouetted against the background of scrawling, stream-of-consciousness text.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1) Ernesto Deira, quoted in Adriana Laurenzi, "La figura humana en la obra de Ernesto Deira," Deira, retrospectiva (Buenos Aires: Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2006), 41.
2) Deira, quoted in María José Herrera, "La experimentación en la obra de Ernesto Deira (1961-1968)," Deira, retrospectiva, 20.
Deira painted sparingly between 1967 and 1975, and the self-portraits of 1968 suggest a pensive state of mind as he probed the philosophical underpinnings of painting and the complexities of self-expression. He had been awarded the prestigious Premio Palanza, Argentina's highest honor, in 1967, and the institutional consecration of his painting seems to have prompted new experimentation in his later work. The self-portraits, including the present Autorretrato, offer a penetrating glimpse into Deira's psyche, frequently mixing linguistic and figurative codes in images that communicate a clamorous, multiplex individuality. He explained his intention at the time of producing work "that provokes rejection, understanding, doubt, resistance, acceptance, discomfort, integration, or repulsion, that questions or responds, that looks at or is seen. A work, ultimately, of dynamic projection."[2] The agonistic duality that he describes is foregrounded in the self-portraits, in which he lays bare the cogitations of a questioning mind, playing the abstraction of word and image against the literality of their appearance.
Deira gazes obliquely outward in the present Autorretrato, only his face well defined within the disfiguring red cloak that engulfs his torso in wrinkled, semitransparent folds. An oversized gloved hand emerges uncannily from an avian-like hood, its fingers and dislocated thumb suggesting a hand-eye-mind analogy that stretches from the written text to the beak-like projection that frames the other side of Deira's face. Like Hay que fugarse de la realidad and Autorretrato (cada 2 x 3), two other self-portraits from the same year, the present work conflates image and text, characteristically here with suggestively scribbled words - "de arte," "lieron," "se dice" - circumscribing Deira's shrouded form. The words carry a strong graphic impact, the letters sometimes diffuse and other times unruly as Deira's script sprawls across the canvas in agitated and slanting lines. Yet the subjectivity of the text also harks back to Deira's philosophical reappraisal of what it meant to paint, an inquiry initiated as early as his 1964 series, En torno al pensamiento A, in which he explored the pre-verbal origins of thought ("A-thought") through the visual idiolect of his painting. Deira's self-portraits weave these ontological questions of painting into deeply introspective images that pry open the foundations of his self-identity, here ruminatively and dramatically figured in the red, amorphous body silhouetted against the background of scrawling, stream-of-consciousness text.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1) Ernesto Deira, quoted in Adriana Laurenzi, "La figura humana en la obra de Ernesto Deira," Deira, retrospectiva (Buenos Aires: Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2006), 41.
2) Deira, quoted in María José Herrera, "La experimentación en la obra de Ernesto Deira (1961-1968)," Deira, retrospectiva, 20.