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拍品专文
“Vardanega’s works are extremely varied,” Michel Ragon wrote on the occasion of his solo exhibition at the Galerie Denise René in 1969. “Although they are almost all in relief or counter-relief, some are more specifically ‘pictorial.’ Albers’s famous square is metamorphosed at the will of programmed light. . . .”1 A highly respected figure in the development of Concrete Art in Buenos Aires during the 1940s and 1950s, Vardanega settled permanently in Paris with his wife, Martha Boto, in 1959. Coining the term “Chromocinétisme,” together they embraced the aesthetics and the new technologies of optical and kinetic art, making mechanical the movement of light, color, and sound and exploring the cosmic dimensions of their art. They fell easily within the orbit of postwar geometric abstraction centered at the Galerie Denise René, exhibiting alongside such artists as Victor Vasarely, Julio Le Parc, Carlos Cruz-Diez, and Jesús Rafael Soto.
Vardanega’s practice had developed between Paris and Buenos Aires since the mid-1940s, following studies at Argentina’s Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes. In 1946, he joined the Asociación Arte Concreto Invención, founded by Alfredo Hlito, Raúl Lozza, Tomás Maldonado, and Lidi Prati, among others, and participated in a number of its group exhibitions over the following years. The Asociación adhered to an orthodox definition of Concretism—art conceived in the mind, rather than abstracted from nature—that had originated with Theo van Doesburg and continued through the work of Max Bill and the Ulm School. Railing against the “formidable mirage” of representational art—“illusion of space; illusion of expression; illusion of reality; illusion of movement”—the group’s “Inventionist Manifesto” (1946) championed “concrete art,” which “makes people relate directly to real things not to fabrications.” Exhorting its audience to “Exalt the Optical,” the manifesto concluded: “Don’t Search or Find: Invent.”2 In 1948, Vardanega traveled to Paris in the company of Juan Melé and Carmelo Arden Quin, making valuable contacts with elder-generation Constructivists including Georges Vantongerloo and Antoine Pevsner. Returning to Argentina in 1950, he became a founding member of the groups Asociación Arte Nuevo (1955) and Artistas no Figurativos Argentinos (1956), both supported by the influential critic Aldo Pellegrini.
While Vardanega investigated the optical effects of transparency and illumination in his sculpture and installation practices of the 1950s, he continued to explore the structures of form and color in his painting, as well. Rectangular blocks of color—black to the left-hand side; malachite green, cobalt blue, and olive green to the right—partition the present Pintura, inviting a side-to-side, optical dialogue across the image. The thin, vertical black line floating near the right edge of the painting echoes across the expansive black field, for example, just as the two parallel lines at the lower left-hand corner relate to their countering color at right. Set in dynamic rotation against the black ground, the primary color triangles acknowledge the lasting influence of Mondrian’s Neo-Plasticism on Vardanega and, no less, on the generation of Argentine artists who sought continually to “invent” within the paradigm of Concrete Art.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1 Michel Ragon, Vardanega, 11 février – 20 mars (Paris: Galerie Denise René, 1969), n.p.
2 “Inventionist Manifesto,” in Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820-1980, ed. Dawn Ades, et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989): 331.
Vardanega’s practice had developed between Paris and Buenos Aires since the mid-1940s, following studies at Argentina’s Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes. In 1946, he joined the Asociación Arte Concreto Invención, founded by Alfredo Hlito, Raúl Lozza, Tomás Maldonado, and Lidi Prati, among others, and participated in a number of its group exhibitions over the following years. The Asociación adhered to an orthodox definition of Concretism—art conceived in the mind, rather than abstracted from nature—that had originated with Theo van Doesburg and continued through the work of Max Bill and the Ulm School. Railing against the “formidable mirage” of representational art—“illusion of space; illusion of expression; illusion of reality; illusion of movement”—the group’s “Inventionist Manifesto” (1946) championed “concrete art,” which “makes people relate directly to real things not to fabrications.” Exhorting its audience to “Exalt the Optical,” the manifesto concluded: “Don’t Search or Find: Invent.”2 In 1948, Vardanega traveled to Paris in the company of Juan Melé and Carmelo Arden Quin, making valuable contacts with elder-generation Constructivists including Georges Vantongerloo and Antoine Pevsner. Returning to Argentina in 1950, he became a founding member of the groups Asociación Arte Nuevo (1955) and Artistas no Figurativos Argentinos (1956), both supported by the influential critic Aldo Pellegrini.
While Vardanega investigated the optical effects of transparency and illumination in his sculpture and installation practices of the 1950s, he continued to explore the structures of form and color in his painting, as well. Rectangular blocks of color—black to the left-hand side; malachite green, cobalt blue, and olive green to the right—partition the present Pintura, inviting a side-to-side, optical dialogue across the image. The thin, vertical black line floating near the right edge of the painting echoes across the expansive black field, for example, just as the two parallel lines at the lower left-hand corner relate to their countering color at right. Set in dynamic rotation against the black ground, the primary color triangles acknowledge the lasting influence of Mondrian’s Neo-Plasticism on Vardanega and, no less, on the generation of Argentine artists who sought continually to “invent” within the paradigm of Concrete Art.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1 Michel Ragon, Vardanega, 11 février – 20 mars (Paris: Galerie Denise René, 1969), n.p.
2 “Inventionist Manifesto,” in Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820-1980, ed. Dawn Ades, et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989): 331.