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拍品专文
“The image, the painting, is not something one projects before setting out to paint and which ends up being just a matter of execution,” Hlito once wrote of his work. “For me the image is almost always a finding on the basis of expectations that the acts of painting can belie, enrich, abolish, or transform. It is these acts that decide, by opening up expectations.”1 That philosophy of painting as a process of discovery, considered in terms both spatial and social, underpinned Hlito’s practice from its earliest inclinations toward geometric abstraction in the mid-1940s. As Hlito and a young generation of Argentine artists came into contact with Constructivist painting, spread locally through the teachings of Joaquín Torres-García, they embraced the socialist ethos of Concretism and its conviction in art’s heuristic role in shaping a new, postwar world.
The 1944 publication of the single-issue magazine Arturo, edited by Carmelo Arden Quin, Rhod Rothfuss, Gyula Kosice, and Edgar Bayley, marked a regional point of origin for Constructivism and precipitated the rise of two groups: Arte Madí and the Asociación Arte Concreto Invención. With artists including Enio Iommi, Raúl Lozza, Tomás Maldonado, and Lidi Prati, Hlito numbered among the founding members of the latter group, which 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. Published to accompany the Asociación’s first exhibition, at the Salón Peuser in 1946, its “Inventionist Manifesto” inveighed against “representational fiction” and “the old phantasmagoria,” proposing in their place “art of action,” in other words “Concrete art” in the service of the “world’s new sense of communion.”2 In a separate manifesto, Hlito and others explained their decision to join the Communist Party in similar language, linking their practice to social militancy and, ultimately, to revolution.
Among the most cogent members of the Asociación, Hlito made numerous theoretical contributions to Concretism, publishing regularly through the 1940s and 1950s in the group’s outlets (Arte Concreto and Boletín de la Asociación Arte Concreto Invención). His painting evolved alongside the group’s exploration of such questions as the shaped canvas, dialectical materialism, and industrial and graphic design. Elementos cromáticos, like his parallel series Ritmos cromáticos, marks Hlito’s first mature experiments in Concretism, moving past the initial influence of Torres-García seen in paintings made a couple of years earlier. Cool and lucid in its arrangement, the canvas insists upon the two-dimensionality of the picture plane: an expansive white field holds an array of colored, rectangular bars spaced in varying intervals around its upper right-hand quadrant. Their precise orthogonal arrangement betrays Hlito’s early deference to the Neo-Plastic grid; later works introduce slanted, off-axis lines and curves. But in this very early Concrete work, the vertical and horizontal elements project weightless geometry, reduced to its purest essentials. “I would like for it to be said of my paintings,” Hlito remarked years later, “that they are metaphors of the visible.”3
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1 Alfredo Hlito, quoted in Nelly Perazzo, “Alfredo Hlito: Metaphors of the Visible,” Art Nexus 3, no. 53 (July-September 2004): 74.
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.
3 Hlito, quoted in Perazzo, “Alfredo Hlito,” 75.
The 1944 publication of the single-issue magazine Arturo, edited by Carmelo Arden Quin, Rhod Rothfuss, Gyula Kosice, and Edgar Bayley, marked a regional point of origin for Constructivism and precipitated the rise of two groups: Arte Madí and the Asociación Arte Concreto Invención. With artists including Enio Iommi, Raúl Lozza, Tomás Maldonado, and Lidi Prati, Hlito numbered among the founding members of the latter group, which 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. Published to accompany the Asociación’s first exhibition, at the Salón Peuser in 1946, its “Inventionist Manifesto” inveighed against “representational fiction” and “the old phantasmagoria,” proposing in their place “art of action,” in other words “Concrete art” in the service of the “world’s new sense of communion.”2 In a separate manifesto, Hlito and others explained their decision to join the Communist Party in similar language, linking their practice to social militancy and, ultimately, to revolution.
Among the most cogent members of the Asociación, Hlito made numerous theoretical contributions to Concretism, publishing regularly through the 1940s and 1950s in the group’s outlets (Arte Concreto and Boletín de la Asociación Arte Concreto Invención). His painting evolved alongside the group’s exploration of such questions as the shaped canvas, dialectical materialism, and industrial and graphic design. Elementos cromáticos, like his parallel series Ritmos cromáticos, marks Hlito’s first mature experiments in Concretism, moving past the initial influence of Torres-García seen in paintings made a couple of years earlier. Cool and lucid in its arrangement, the canvas insists upon the two-dimensionality of the picture plane: an expansive white field holds an array of colored, rectangular bars spaced in varying intervals around its upper right-hand quadrant. Their precise orthogonal arrangement betrays Hlito’s early deference to the Neo-Plastic grid; later works introduce slanted, off-axis lines and curves. But in this very early Concrete work, the vertical and horizontal elements project weightless geometry, reduced to its purest essentials. “I would like for it to be said of my paintings,” Hlito remarked years later, “that they are metaphors of the visible.”3
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1 Alfredo Hlito, quoted in Nelly Perazzo, “Alfredo Hlito: Metaphors of the Visible,” Art Nexus 3, no. 53 (July-September 2004): 74.
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.
3 Hlito, quoted in Perazzo, “Alfredo Hlito,” 75.