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Lot Essay
This work is sold with a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist from Van Eyck Galería de Arte.
Raúl Lozza was one of the most active and influential participants in the different movements and groups affiliated to geometric abstraction that emerged in Argentina in the 1940s. Born in 1911, Lozza had begun painting and drawing at a very early age, establishing a workshop with his brothers in the late 1920s. During the 1930s Lozza became a member of the Communist Party and was persecuted and imprisoned. He later worked in advertising, as a commercial artist and designer. His studio, with furniture and bookcases designed and painted by Lozza, became a gathering place for local artists and intellectuals at the time, including Lucio Fontana, Emilio Pettoruti, and Jorge Romero Brest who accompanied, as theorist and critic, the emergence of geometric abstraction in Argentina. Between 1944 and 1945 Lozza was on the editorial board of the Contrapunto, a bimonthly magazine dedicated to art, literature, and criticism, and in 1945 he was one of the founding members of the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención, along with Tomás Maldonado, Lidy Prati, Claudio Girola, Enio Iommi, Edgar Bayley, Alfredo Hlito, and Manuel Espinosa, among others. The Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención promoted concrete art as an art of invention, invested in the creation of new objects and a new reality brought about by the transformative social potential of these "inventions." In formal terms this was translated into a heightened concern for the spatialization of painting, its transcendence beyond the frame and into space, the use of the irregular frame, and the dissolution of the figure-ground relation, which for them was conducive to representation.
In 1947, after leaving the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención, Lozza formed the group Perceptismo, and between 1950 and 1953 published the magazine Perceptismo. Teórico y Polémico, where he would write on the fundamentals of his new movement. In Pintura no. 167 (1948) some of the principles laid out by Lozza in his various writings are made evident. Unlike other paintings by Lozza in which the painting breaks entirely with the frame in an attempt to integrate the wall or surrounding architectural space, this one is more conventionally set in a black rectangular board which nevertheless suggests a potential spatialization of the figures, which are appended to the board almost as floating objects in a geometrical relation described by the diagram included on the back of the painting. For Lozza this new kind of painting would enable the spectator to compensate between forms and colours and force the eye and the mind to make these geometrical relations that projected the forms beyond their support and into three-dimensional space, while suggesting another set of abstract forms derived from the geometric projection of these shapes into space. For Lozza, new forms demanded new relations and it was his intention to give the spectator an active part in the perception of these relations by the particular placement, color, and shape of these forms in the pictorial space.
Julieta González, independent curator
Raúl Lozza was one of the most active and influential participants in the different movements and groups affiliated to geometric abstraction that emerged in Argentina in the 1940s. Born in 1911, Lozza had begun painting and drawing at a very early age, establishing a workshop with his brothers in the late 1920s. During the 1930s Lozza became a member of the Communist Party and was persecuted and imprisoned. He later worked in advertising, as a commercial artist and designer. His studio, with furniture and bookcases designed and painted by Lozza, became a gathering place for local artists and intellectuals at the time, including Lucio Fontana, Emilio Pettoruti, and Jorge Romero Brest who accompanied, as theorist and critic, the emergence of geometric abstraction in Argentina. Between 1944 and 1945 Lozza was on the editorial board of the Contrapunto, a bimonthly magazine dedicated to art, literature, and criticism, and in 1945 he was one of the founding members of the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención, along with Tomás Maldonado, Lidy Prati, Claudio Girola, Enio Iommi, Edgar Bayley, Alfredo Hlito, and Manuel Espinosa, among others. The Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención promoted concrete art as an art of invention, invested in the creation of new objects and a new reality brought about by the transformative social potential of these "inventions." In formal terms this was translated into a heightened concern for the spatialization of painting, its transcendence beyond the frame and into space, the use of the irregular frame, and the dissolution of the figure-ground relation, which for them was conducive to representation.
In 1947, after leaving the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención, Lozza formed the group Perceptismo, and between 1950 and 1953 published the magazine Perceptismo. Teórico y Polémico, where he would write on the fundamentals of his new movement. In Pintura no. 167 (1948) some of the principles laid out by Lozza in his various writings are made evident. Unlike other paintings by Lozza in which the painting breaks entirely with the frame in an attempt to integrate the wall or surrounding architectural space, this one is more conventionally set in a black rectangular board which nevertheless suggests a potential spatialization of the figures, which are appended to the board almost as floating objects in a geometrical relation described by the diagram included on the back of the painting. For Lozza this new kind of painting would enable the spectator to compensate between forms and colours and force the eye and the mind to make these geometrical relations that projected the forms beyond their support and into three-dimensional space, while suggesting another set of abstract forms derived from the geometric projection of these shapes into space. For Lozza, new forms demanded new relations and it was his intention to give the spectator an active part in the perception of these relations by the particular placement, color, and shape of these forms in the pictorial space.
Julieta González, independent curator