Artists

A beautiful anthological exhibition at the Ruth Benzacar Gallery pays tribute to the work (and life) of Roberto Aizenberg, the man who – side by side with Xul Solar and Battle Planas, who was his teacher – reinvented the surrealist paradigm by dint of rigor, an obstinate classicism and an aesthetic conviction that was alien to all the imperatives of fashion.

Bobby finished sharpening his pencils and arranged them from smallest to largest on the edge of the desk. He placed the ruler and compass in the pencil case and looked up at the chemistry teacher, who was finishing designing an atomic structure. But his eyes saw beyond, far beyond the chalk satellites on the blackboard: they went through the thick walls of the classroom of the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, filtered between the buildings of Plaza de Mayo, and reached the river. It was only then that Bobby began to neatly trace the little drawing of a hand coming out of the water. “It was something painful, as if an uncontrollable force was growing out of me. A very rare thing, of which I had no previous record,” Roberto “Bobby” Aizenberg would later recall, as he reconstructed his beginnings in painting. This conception of the artist as an instrument of revelation, as an apparatus that receives and transmits information, would forever mark his work. These days, the Ruth Benzacar Gallery is exhibiting a suggestive selection of the work of one of the three most important philo-surrealist painters in Argentina (including Batlle Planas and Xul Solar in the triad). But if it is convenient to put “surrealism” in quotation marks, it is because from the very beginning the movement arrived on our shores under water, taken with tweezers by these artists who, more than anything else, rescued its spirit. This is how Aizenberg understood it: “To be a surrealist means to feel, in a tremendous way, the impact of existence, to develop visionary virtues, and to pursue, through patient craftsmanship, a constant inquiry into human knowledge.” His work, however, carries a sense of contained terribilità that refers to the order of the ominous and spreads the imminent feeling that the most everyday things will assail us, all of a sudden, like ghosts.

No matter what label is given to it (sharpening the pencil, Aldo Pellegrini described it as “metaphysical geometry”), Aizenberg’s work always ends up escaping. As soon as we think we recognize the elongated shadows and mannequins that make him similar to De Chirico, the biomorphisms of Dalí or the harlequins of Max Ernst appear to us. Because Aizenberg is a particular case, as Marcelo Pacheco lucidly said in the 2001 retrospective at the Recoleta Cultural Center. Indifferent to fashions, Aizenberg began painting in the early 1950s, at the same time that informalism was bursting onto the international scene with the force of a squash ball hitting a canvas. In this “politics of gesture,” art became a ferocious matter. In his immaculate studio, far from any informalist entanglement, Aizenberg approached his work like a classical painter: “I am a time machine that does not know the past, the present, and the future, because I do not want to remain locked in any of those boxes.”

He kept on his own way, with his sable hair brushes numbered from 1 to 20, and a rigorous technique that allowed him to create a world under the clash of two swords. He used the method of psychic automatism learned from his master Batlle Planas in a first stage of his work, which made the internal image appear without the regulating intervention of reason. Thus, the painter became the “receiver of the maximum of information with the minimum of interference.” Later, the automatic creations underwent a process of selection that purified the image down to the bone: “A strict, I would even say cruel, labor.”

Going back to Aizenberg’s interest in certain universal archetypes, the exhibition is projected as a portrait of three obsessions: the geometric figures of pure planes of color and full blacks, which include one of his “floaters,”  those polygons that take off from the ground, levitate, and recall, in their cosmic atmosphere, the flying totem of 2001: A Space Odyssey-; the biomorphic figures whose color combinations border on kitsch; and the multiple towers,of superimposed prismatic volumes—sometimes smooth, sometimes in rows, but always with tremendous shadows—born as a result of the Babel of Genesis and ending up resembling a door, a monument, a temple, the Kavanagh building, or even an Italian coffee pot.

Aizenberg is the Piero della Francesca of modern painting. There is nothing to hit him with. His interest in geometry, symmetrical composition, calculated perfection, the reduction of forms to the essential, precise contours, architecture, the graceful solemnity of the figures, and, above all, a state of passionate concentration, are factors that link him through the centuries to the painter of Borgo San Sepulcro.

It is not surprising that hyper-production of sketches flourishes everywhere in such a precise painter, in the margins of newspapers, behind the invitations of his time’s galleries, on common papers.There are his searches, his sketches. Many fell by the wayside, victims of the filter of a precision embarked on “a constant search between what I see inside and what is outside.” And also because of the rigor, he added the use of an oil diluted in oil that dried slowly, very slowly, which only allowed him to finish five or six paintings per year but which, in compensation, allowed him an impeccable finish.

And there is also the question of time. There is one work that stands out in the exhibition: a building the color of coffee with cold milk, without doors, with four horizontal rows of little black windows perfectly equal and a low horizon, as always in Aizenberg, which is so low that it cannot even be seen because the building covers everything and because behind it rises an old grape sky that blackens towards the top. It is an image of tremendous power and resonance.

In “The machine that stopped time,”  Dino Buzzati tells the story of the creation of Diacosia, a city surrounded by an electrostatic field where time passes more slowly and men age twice as slowly as the rest of mortals. Because of the shock of acceleration that contact with the outside world represents for the organism, the inhabitants are forced to remain enclosed in this jungle of immense buildings. Aizenberg’s atmospheres are reminiscent of Diacosia when they give the sensation of perpetual imprisonment inside a gloomy and twisted building, a sign of a prison, a barracks, a hospital, or a fortress, with a time that is more vertical than horizontal, as Bachelard would say, that does not follow the common compass but is suspended or, at least, slowed down. And it has no doors to exit.

The exhibition’s set-up is reminiscent of the Parisian salons of the 19th century. Its antiquated air promotes an exhibition design in tune with this work of “deliberate anachronism”, as Nicolás Guagnini describes it in the text of the catalog. After seeing so many white walls in Buenos Aires galleries (an insistence that becomes a recipe), the fact that the works here are not afraid to approach, to whisper to each other, to mingle with others by Batlle Planas, reviewing allegiances and deviations, is encouraging. The small living room set up in a corner of the gallery with works by Siquier, Avello, Ballesteros, and Polesello, artists who at some point stopped at Aizenberg’s work to absorb it and return it in other and new images, attests to the fact that Aizenberg was a “study case.”This affective history that the gallery presents is its homage to the master: it is a “Bobby comes home”.

There are three memorable fires in the history of the 20th century. One appears at the end of Kawabata’s The Land of Snow; another is the true story—later recreated by Mishima in The Golden Pavilion—that occurred in Kyoto at the end of World War II, when a young apprentice monk burned down one of Japan’s most important cultural heritages. The third was painted by Aizenberg. It is not in the exhibition—the painting is owned by one of its most important collectors—and perhaps that is why it is inevitable to remember it. It is Fire at the Hasidist College in Minsk in 1713, a painting of just 20 x 13 cm in which a school in Belarus burns, and the viscous smoke escaping through the windows and the ceiling foretells a fire that will occur 50 years later, and of which Aizenberg was unaware. (He had chosen 1713 in homage to Breton, whose initials, arranged in a certain way, form that figure). In all these cases, fire emerges as both destructive and purifying. This ambivalence, this simultaneity of opposites, shows that poetic instants, no matter where they appear, always open up a metaphysical perspective.

Aizenberg was born in 1928 in Villa Federal, the colony of Russian emigrants in Entre Ríos. He studied architecture for a year and briefly passed through Antonio Berni’s studio, but soon became bored with academic drawing. He finally found the “promised land” in the hands of Battle Planas. With the support of Aldo Pellegrini and Jorge Romero Brest, he presented his first retrospective at the Di Tella in 1969. In 1977, he settled in Paris, then spent some time in Milan before returning to Buenos Aires in 1984. He died in 1996, at the age of 68.

Three of his “adopted” children disappeared during the last military dictatorship. As someone who understood his images as the materialization of a mysterious communication with the universe, and saw himself as an antenna capable of capturing the unknown, it is possible that that first sketch of a hand emerging from the water, born within the walls of the same Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires that years later would know terror, was a premonition of his own destiny.

Diario Página 12, 26 de Octubre 2003, Buenos Aires.

A large anthology recently inaugurated at the Recoleta Cultural Center covers the impeccable and enigmatic work of a unique case in the Argentine visual arts: Roberto Aizenberg. Paintings, drawings, sculptures, engravings, objects, collages, graphics, jewelry design, and sketches (as well as a group show of disciples and followers) allow us to look from different angles at his great obsession: the distillation of dreams and the transparency of nightmares.

Roberto Aizenberg, along with other Batlle Planas disciples, took part in an exhibition at the Wilensky Gallery in Buenos Aires in 1954. There he presented a drawing and two oil paintings. One of the paintings, enigmatic and dreamlike, measuring only twenty-nine centimeters by twenty, is The Fire in the Hasidist School in Minsk, 1713. It evokes a red and dark building (“of nefarious reds,” said the painter), in flames, where dense, compact, disturbing smoke invades a large part of the painting.

With the passage of time, posterity turned that small canvas into a paradigmatic work of the artist’s production. “I don’t know what led me to give it that title,” Aizenberg would say thirty-five years later. “It came to me as I was leaving a friend’s studio. The name could have been any other. There may have been Hasidic schools in Minsk, and pogroms may have taken place. It is likely that one of those schools was burned down. I have no data and never cared to look for it.”

The value of this conjectural painting as an emblem of Aizenberg’s work was what led the organizers of the exhibition to reproduce it on the cover of the invitation card that was printed by the hundreds to be massively distributed. The card was delivered on time to all recipients on Tuesday, September 11th. That morning, all of us who received it at the same time were stunned in front of the television, watching the Twin Towers burn live and seeing the card as a metaphor for a nightmare that seemed to announce the unfortunate combination of fanaticism and terror. Art has a strong premonitory charge. Especially in the work of Aizenberg, who created a dreamlike, nightmarish, cabalistic, metaphysical, and poetic atmosphere in his images.

A case report

An anthology exhibition of Roberto Aizenberg’s work (1928–1996) was inaugurated the night before last at the Sala Cronopios of the Centro Cultural Recoleta (CCR). It brings together 120 paintings, drawings, engravings, sculptures, objects, sketches, collages, jewelry designs, graphics, and sketches made between the late 1940s and 1994.

The exhibition, curated by Marcelo Pacheco, with museography by Gustavo Vásquez Ocampo, is divided into three chapters, and the panels and platforms used for each chapter are painted in different colors (yellow, light blue, and light green), in turn tinged with semitones. To accompany and document the exhibition, the CCR printed a very good 120-page catalog book.

The chapters do not follow a linear structure, as the chronology is juxtaposed around technical, formal, and sense nuclei. The first section spans the years 1950-1976, from the beginnings to the beginnings of the dictatorship. It traces a parallel path between drawing and painting. In the first case, we see the predominance of the figure. The geometric paradigm is presented in the second.

The second sector takes the period 1971–1976: paintings, sculptures, and engravings with thematic developments. This sector focuses on the exhibition that Aizenberg presented at the Art Gallery of Victor Najmias in 1975, where the artist developed a thematic series and mixed anthropomorphic figures with geometry.

The third chapter shows the work of the exile in Europe—Paris, Tarquinia and Milan—and the return to Argentina.

The exhibition bears a strange title: The Roberto Aizenberg Case. The idea of “case” introduces the notion of the exceptional. Aizenberg is an exception in several ways. In principle, he is an artist who has been highly respected and valued since his youth, but at the same time, his diffusion does not manage to get outside the circle of connoisseurs and colleagues. He is also called a “case” because he has been associated almost exclusively with surrealism – he himself claimed automatism and surrealist theory—but his work never fully conformed to that tendency: there is a notable mismatch with surrealism in the very practice of his work and in the particularity of the image. He is also an almost clinical “case” because of the rigor and obsessive method with which he worked. Precisely, the third block of the exhibition includes a ten-meter showcase that is practically a self-contained exhibition, displaying everything from the beautiful and academic drawings that Aizenberg made while studying with Antonio Berni, to the follow-up of the development of a specific work, thus illustrating the “Aizenberg method”: the relentless visual research, experimentation, testing, sketches, and variations until he found what he was looking for. The entire exhibition can be seen as a trace of series and repertoires that run subtly or overtly through his entire production. Larval nuclei, incipient forms that reappear several decades later, elements and constants, and so on.

The idea of “case” is also verified in Aizenberg’s development against the grain of his time. The “case” is in turn an Argentine cultural model, in the sense that there is a whole tradition that especially values artists, writers, musicians, scientists, and intellectuals who make their way within the limits of the “clinical” case, as opposed to or in the absence of the idea of “school.” The shooting star versus the constellation. The phenomenal versus the everyday.

Autobiography and exile

In 1967, Aizenberg wrote a poetic autobiography that defines him: “Solitary-crazy-atávico-melancholic-allegorical-realist-painter-drawer-philosopher-body of plenty-introvert-extrovert-born on the advice of the major planets, August 22, 1928. Mesopotamian drinker of angelic and blue waters. Prefers to use sable brushes numbered 1 to 20. Flight of hummingbirds in the evening. There are a lot of pamphlet princes in the autumn nights. His favorite colors: those that lead to the interior of virgin forests; the color of the poet’s oblique eye; the colors of the wind, and the reddish purple of the menadas. The colors of the parturient. Some nefarious reds glimpsed in Minsk in 1713. The audacity of the Argonauts”.

Roberto Aizenberg was born in Federal, province of Entre Ríos. He began drawing in the mid-1940s and began painting in 1949 when he attended Antonio Berni’s workshop. Between 1950 and 1953, he studied with Juan Batlle Planas. “Batlle, said Aizenberg in 1975, “was the most important person I have ever known and the one who taught me to think in the deepest sense of the concept. And in no other being, nor anywhere else, neither before nor after him, did I find anything that resembled the theoretical reality or the practical reality that Batlle transmitted to us.”

Aizenberg’s production forms part of the most disturbing and enigmatic aspect of modern Argentine painting: a “case”. His work seems to reconstruct dreams with great precision. Although his images are dreamlike, they are not blurred, but rather absolutely pure and sharp, illuminated with a cold light, in a climate that often evokes a deceptive serenity.

He claimed surrealism, but he was not part of the central avenue of Argentine surrealism; rather, he was an “equidistant surrealist,”  as one of his group exhibitions described him.

In 1964, the Di Tella Institute included him in the Surrealism exhibition in Argentina. Aizenberg’s career was shaped by Jorge Romero Brest and the Di Tella. A good part of his artistic development during the 1960s passed through Di Tella and its surroundings, such as the Asociación Ver y Estimar that had launched the painter and draftsman in 1960. If the Di Tella functioned as a consecrating institution, Ver y Estimar was a sort of anteroom or pre-launching. Also in 1960, Aizenberg took part in the “First International Exhibition of Modern Art” at the then recently founded Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires. The following year, his work was included in a large exhibition of contemporary Argentine art organized at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro. Two years later, he participated in the fourth edition of the Torcuato Di Tella National Painting Award, and was part of the Argentinean team sent to the Sao Paulo Biennial.

In 1964, he was part of the selection committee for the Fifth Di Tella Award.

In 1969, the Visual Arts Center of the Di Tella Institute organized a retrospective exhibition of Aizenberg, who was 40 years old at the time, which included 127 works made between 1947 and 1968: 52 paintings, 60 drawings, 12 collages, and three wood sculptures. He began an international career after that, exhibiting in museums and galleries in the United States, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Germany, Colombia, Italy, Spain, and Paris, where he settled in 1977 after the dictatorship kidnapped and disappeared his wife, Matilde.

Return and descendants

His painful return took place with the return of democracy. He teaches, sets up a workshop, and continues to participate in national and international exhibitions.

In 1992, the bombing of the Israeli Embassy marked the beginning of a strong depression and the relapse of heart problems that had haunted him for twenty years. But he continued to paint and to work. After two operations, he died in February 1996.

Aizenberg’s obsessive work is built around the distillation of dreams and the transparency of nightmares. His image always appears embedded in a timeless space, and behind it lies a religious echo that has been purified over the decades. He used them as models for his books on medicine, fashion, and sports in the nineteenth century several times. This anachronism plays with and combines elements and techniques of the present and the future to achieve a paradoxical certainty: the more certain the artist seems, the more mysterious his work and the more enigmatic it is for the viewer. But certainty is not only a question of image but also of construction, structure, composition, and technique.

His production radiates a rare severity that impassioned several disciples and young followers who are precisely now presenting, in another room of the same center, a group show in homage to the master: Iván Calmet, Nessy Cohen, Alejandro Dron, Gabriela Francone, Nicolás Guagnini, Magdalena Jitrik, and Luis Lindner. As can be seen in the contagion of the Aizenberg virus, his work is remarkably inspiring: an aesthetic and ethical model.

The combination of rationality and cabala, of dreams and metaphysics, exerts a strong magnetism for the viewer, because the contained commotion of the works becomes visible. One of the central elements of his pictorial work is the construction of the monument. There is an evocative power in these architectures, because they are emblems of the urban, of the sacred in the everyday, and of a certain nostalgia for the humanism that the world was losing. Aizenberg’s constructions stand solitary and generally suffocate in the space of the canvas.

But the architectural conception leads the artist to an inescapable relationship with the human figure, as if the encounters and misencounters between man and architecture were the result of successive blind dates, alternately unsuccessful or successful. Architecture in Aizenberg’s work is fundamentally a relationship between plastic art and humanism. But at the same time, the urban trace is threatening and endangers his characters. “Everything that exists must be painted as an enigma,” said the artist, “since art as pure metaphysics poses very easy and insoluble enigmas to men who think they know everything.”

Diario Página 12, 23 de Septiembre 2001, Buenos Aires.

The Centro Cultural Recoleta opens this month with a great retrospective of Bobby Aizenberg, the most interesting Argentinean cultivator of surrealism and metaphysical painting. The exhibition recovers an artist consecrated in the sixties, exiled in the seventies, and almost forgotten in his last years.

Those who knew him say that Bobby Aizenberg (1928–1996) was a very good person. Someone remarks in passing that “he was not easy”, in reference to his character. Franca Beer, wife of Guillermo Roux (one of his closest friends), adjusts the concept: “He always felt he was someone who had a gift, and he conveyed that awareness in his personality; he was not arrogant, he commanded respect. He was special, and he knew it.

Early recognized as a ‘young master’, in 1969 Aizenberg was invited to present a retrospective of his work at the Di Tella Institute. He was forty years old, had the bearing of a prince, and a multifaceted talent for the visual arts that unfolded in paintings, drawings, sculptures, and engravings. His images were considered metaphysical and surrealistic: he declared himself a cult of automatism despite the fact that each work was the synthesis of infinite sketches, tests, calculations, and previous drawings. This month, the Centro Cultural Recoleta presents an anthology by Roberto Aizenberg that promises to reveal in all its magnitude the figure of this great Argentine artist of the 20th century.

Aizenberg was born in 1928 in the Entre Ríos town of Villa Federal, son of Russian immigrants. As a teenager, he discovered himself as a painter, but his decisive incorporation into the art world would not take place until after 1950, when he met his teacher, Juan Batlle Planas. Batlle was part of a generation marked by the European avant-garde and more specifically by the pictorial-literary adventures of surrealism; his teachings about automatic creation—liberating unconscious zones—marked Aizenberg’s work. Between 1947 and 1968, the period covered in Di Tella’s consecration exhibition, the artist produced a forceful and disturbing body of work, often complemented by titles of rare poetry. For example, Ciudad engalanada para recibir a los principes de la Baja Sajonia, a hypothetical landscape in which his tendency towards geometry could be appreciated.

In the seventies, the tragedy of the country burst into his life in an intolerably violent way: the three children of his wife, Matilde Herrera, were kidnapped and disappeared. By then, Buenos Aires had already received lacerating news from far away: they had settled in Paris, Tarquinia, and Milan. Upon his return, the country was different, as was he. His paintings became more and more hermetic and stripped, the irony of his titles gave way to a laconic repertoire of paintings, towers, and monuments accompanied by the corresponding numbering. Until his death in 1996 (his heart had already taken too many blows), he continued to exhibit his works sporadically, although he no longer enjoyed the recognition he had enjoyed before his exile. Curiously, or not so much, today many young artists claim him as an unavoidable reference.

PAYING THE DEBT

The exhibition at the Recoleta Cultural Center was a pending account: Aizenberg himself had approached the Center but was unable to carry out the project of putting it together. The current director, Nora Hochbaum, felt last year that the Recoleta owed him a place in the program of the Cronopios hall, dedicated to reviewing the trajectory of fundamental artists in the history of Argentine art.

Hochbaum summoned Marcelo Pacheco, a local curator and theorist who has earned well-deserved international prestige with his always exhaustive and well-documented presentations. Pacheco, who never had any personal dealings with Bobby, undertook the task of recovering, touring, and analyzing his work, and the result is the exhibition of more than a hundred pieces that will be on view starting on the 21st of this month.

“The exhibition does not have a strictly retrospective intent,” the researcher explains, “It does not make a chronological raking of stages, but it is proposed as a “clinical” approach, which is why we call it The Bobby Aizenberg Case.”The diversity of techniques used by the artist will be included in this panoramic flight over his production, divided into four main areas. Pacheco explains: “The first part includes paintings and works on paper from the fifties and sixties, in which landscapes and human figures are contrasted in broad strokes. The second part has works from the seventies and is a group that he showed at the Najmías gallery; the third part covers the last years, the eighties and nineties, and are large works on paper that, for me, show his most interesting side”.

A final section will try to relate, beyond dates and techniques, Aizenberg’s work system, famous for its rigor, perfectionism, and meticulousness. A selection of sketches, notes, and calculations of proportions will retrace the steps of the final works, bringing to the forefront an instance—that of concentrated work in the workshop—that is usually taken for granted. This curatorial commitment is, a priori, one of the most interesting aspects of the Roberto Aizenberg case. The other relevant decision of the proposal is the production of a complete catalog that will include, in addition to color reproductions, three studies on surrealism in Argentine culture (by Guillermo Whitelow, Adriana Lauría and Jorge Dubatti), a biographical chronology (Gabriela Francone), a bibliography (Silvia Beláustegui), and a brief dossier of historical texts.

FRIENDS AND ADMIRERS

I had heard Ruth Benzacar and Juan Carlos Distéfano talk a lot about Aizenberg,” says Pacheco, “but what I found when I reviewed his archives was the work of an absolutely rigorous artist, who used automatism as a trigger, but then exercised an obvious elaboration that led to the image.”

In terms of working methods, Bobby maintained differences with colleagues and friends. Distéfano, whose use of the absurd tends to be strategic, nevertheless shared an enormous affinity with him. Guillermo Roux, another of his close friends, recalls in these terms the relationship that united them: “Our friendship was as complicated as it could be, being different personalities. His is hermetic and metaphysical, while mine is sensual and expansive.We talked a lot about art. With that intensity with which he expressed his statements, which at the same time hid the need for answers. He was a fine, discreet, and well-educated man. He loved his job, and he carried it out in depth, waiting patiently, like the classics, for the oil to dry between coats. Regarding automatism, he points out: “He placed it at the center of all creation. He automatically produced an infinite number of drawings, the selection of which caused him anguish, since, in order to paint them, he spent months on each work. It is a contradiction that he always tried to solve”.

Aldo Pellegrini, a critic and writer who played a central role in the local legitimization of surrealism, published several articles in the fifties that naturally accompanied Aizenberg’s development as an artist. In a note that appeared in the magazine A partir de cero, in 1952, he said: “The surrealist does not resign himself, he is essentially nonconformist, and starting from the principle that the source of all knowledge is in the interior of man, he submerges himself in his own spirit, crossing the rational plane, and there, in the depths of his ego, he finds the world”.

In the last years of his life, Aizenberg dove and encountered insurmountable obscurities. Sadness. Losses. Disenchantment. Yet he continued to work. Roux observes that “he was a great artist, one of those who no longer exist. Of deep convictions, an ethical sense of art and of life, and a moral solidity that he demonstrated in the most tragic moments of his existence. In spite of everything that happened to him, he believed in Art and in man, at a time when cynicism is growing every day. Bobby was a classic”.

The current relevance of the classic will be sealed in The Roberto Aizenberg Case, with the parallel presentation of a second exhibition in which a group of young artists will pay a sort of homage to him. Gabriela Francone, Luis Linder, Magdalena Jitrik, Iván Calmet, Alessandro Dron, Nicolás Guagnini, and Nessy Cohen (the last two were his disciples) will show with their works why they respect Bobby Aizenberg’s legacy.

This generational tribute is more than suggestive in a country where many genealogies were abruptly truncated: Bobby must have done something to earn this admiration.

EGO Magazine, year 1 Nº7, September 2001, Buenos Aires, pages 20 and 21.

Roberto Aizenberg’s studio is at the back of his house in San Telmo. Only his body appears to move in there without disrupting the order; an order that begins with the brushes, paint knobs lined up by color, and continues intact in an envelope of small, dated sketches, in the architecture, and in the landscape of the works that face the studio, waiting for the moment when Aizenberg returns to them and changes the background or the intensity of a color.

The light cement floor has no stains. There is a faint scent of wood emanating from the hundreds of frames, not fresh paint. Yet Aizenberg paints every day. And almost all the time: “If I could, I’d be in here 24 hours a day. But you have to sleep, so I work 10 or 12 hours straight.”

Inés Katzenstein: Is this organization a necessity?

Roberto Aizenberg: Yes, I need order in everything, it is something inexplicable, as are so many behaviors. The order in which I work and the order of the works are completely coherent to me.For me, there is no such thing as incoherence.

I.K.: Do you also have an order when you paint?

R.A.: I have been working for many years with a method, automatism; a way by which it is possible to achieve a maximum of information with a minimum of interferences. The idea is that you have to create as nature does, without ideology or dogma. Without preconceptions. You have to paint with the naturalness of breathing, as blood flows.

I.K.: Doesn’t the idea of “painting without ideology” seem utopian to you?

R.A.: I know how difficult it is to be purely automatic, but I work from small pencil sketches, which I have managed to get fully assembled, ready to be put in the oven. Afterwards, it is the painting that commands, and guides you. Sometimes it gets perverse and leads you down the wrong path, but if you let it lead you, it gets back on track. So I work on several paintings at the same time, waiting for them to dry and leaving them there until new solutions appear. In painting, as in science, the question is to investigate, because things are solved by trial and error. If something is uncomfortable, you have to try and try until the solution appears.

Artinf, year 19 Nº 90 autumn 1995.

“The heart that beats for this world has become almost extinct in me. It is as if my only link with ‘these’ things were memory.”

Paul Klee, 1915

The memory of beings, objects, and landscapes beyond the visible has been a recurring theme in Aizenberg’s work, his eyes looking outward.

I remember a totalizing exhibition of his work, beyond the retrospective character that had been given to it, in a revealing sense of a personal process: the one held at the Di Tella Institute in mid-1969. Since then, many things have happened in his work, somehow prefigured in that group, that made possible such an active participation in his interiority, a prospective participation that was confirmed in his later exhibitions, even in what he anticipated of the last one.

He said that rarely has a process of that nature revealed its mechanisms with such dramatic nudity, with such a self-despirate will of testimony, and with such an assumption of an illuminated and prevalent theme. I recall, I insist, the tremendous, distressing “fire of the Jasidist College of Minsk” among the drawings and oil paintings of his first stage—which would later invade three-dimensionality—and the other extreme, the obsessive geometric figures from which he developed an experience, in which each step sharpened the advance on dimensions whose purity, whose uncontamination, placed them not only in another reality but even further, in another metaphysics.The abandoned cities in front of which the minuscule witnesses are abyssed, the “collages” of mysterious relationships, and then their extreme correlate in simple forms: four irregular bodies, for example, crossed by parallel lines, projected in shadows on the supporting plane, which could lead to signify a secret unreality, claimed that filiation.

But. In that memorable Di Tella exhibition, and especially in the face of the ascetic limits of some of his proposals, that secret unreality was revealed, not as the obverse of a certain reality, which could be the reality of the windows, of the cities, of solitude, of silence, even of the infinite that could be perceived, even imagined, here, but as the ungraspable unreality of another unknown reality—the invisibility of a visibility?—for which the enunciating signs were gradually losing meaning or allusive efficacy. The anguish elicited by those simple figures suspended—or appearing—in spaces as densely empty as they were supernaturally illuminated foreshadowed another movement, one of disturbing, overwhelming vertigo.And it anticipated a question: after this, what next?

The answer was given by his later work. Aizenberg arrived, not without going through dramatic instances, to that limit beyond which only emptiness is possible – color and forms had become almost ectoplasms on the verge of being totally evanescent in just a breath of evidence – and from there he returned, enriched by that extreme experience, almost an exile, closely linked to the mystical. And his later images—pictorial and sculptural—took on corporeality without losing any of their enrichment, the incarnation almost completely stripped away.As Matilde Herrera said, anticipating all that she would have as the center of that memory in her own works: “Then they will come, the characters, and there will be no tremors. Because it will already be clear that every head can be an object, that every body sprouts into unpredictable forms, that flesh and bones disappear leaving room for space”.

That space that is memory, the great theme of Roberto Aizenberg.

ARTINF Magazine, year16 Nº83, Spring 1992.

The word becomes insufficient in front of these paintings by Roberto Aizenberg, as if the universe of the eye—image and gaze—were a territory of difficult contact with the certainties and ambiguities of language.The world is present in these paintings, and the first impulse is silence. The world is present—painted—in fragment and totality, and every word that tries to discourse from, comment on, or touch what the painting says, borders on the sacrilege of the unnecessary. However, these paintings are made to be enjoyed and suffered by the gaze, but also for thought and memory to fly over them later. From that place of memory, language attempts its discourse, unbound by the visual presence, an image that overwhelms the word to provoke it later.

And it comes back to the same thing: everything is said there, in those faces of a timeless and blind proximity on blue or red backgrounds that do not erect landscapes, geographies of once recognizable uninhabited towers. There is no other landscape than that of personal vicissitudes. Vicissitude, on the other hand, is transformed into line and drawing, color invented on color itself, faces where the flesh is flat with the weight and blood of the plane, counterpainting to open a space to the reality of who we are.Everything is said there, in these paintings, in their drawn austerity, in the immobility/mobility of his figures, in the universe on the canvas that asks the eye and the gaze to take us to the same craft of persistence and vigil. Unknowns and sufferings are there, as are losses and emptiness.

Painting is a silent art. But always, in the hands of a great master, it breaks its silence. All silences.

Review used in the catalog of the exhibition “Homage to Matilde”, at the Palatina Gallery, December 1991.

The empty and the full decided to exchange their roles. Everything that was empty became full, and everything that was full became empty. Houses became compact blocks whose empty interstices took the place of interior walls and ceilings, separating rooms in the form of solid cubes, perforated by empty cavities that reproduced the shapes of objects and furniture. Whether the doors and windows were open or closed made no difference, because the air in the rooms was immobile cement, while the things that could usually be stolen were air.

People were empty wrappings, but there were few willing to lose the rigidity and gravity that characterized their authority and firmness of character: moreover, their packaging was greater than ever, and they dilated their own dimensions, no longer constrained within the limits of their bodily consistency. One can dispose of one’s emptiness more easily than one’s own consistency, stretching or branching, and the more emptiness one disposes of, the better off one will be. On the other hand, those who would have liked to have an inner space in which to retreat, searched uselessly in the depths of their own souls;  the refuge they hoped to find was obstructed, filled with rubble, and walled up.

All of these occurrences had a greater impact on the inside than the outside. The external surfaces had retained all their importance, and one could even say that the world was only a surface beneath which there was emptiness or a thick and homogeneous density. Both modes of being, empty and full, held in their uniformity few surprises: and since the inside was inert and insipid, the only interesting thing that remained was the outside. All forms could be reduced to the flat, variegated, and articulated tegument that clads the world’s deceptive three-dimensional appearance, like a crustacean shell, of the world.Every physical presence (there was no difference between the living and the inanimate) could be decomposed into sheets, slabs, and scales, assembled by reciprocal pressure like the staves of a barrel that come loose if the iron fences that hold them together are broken.

The question of whether wood (planed pottery, solid dowels) or metal (in sheets or ingots) dominated in such a world is secondary. It would be more important to know what were the dominant passions that stirred the hearts, whether they were full or empty: ambition, loneliness, anguish, rapture of cruelty, annihilation, desire for possession, nostalgia.

There are those who say that everything was like this. There are those who say that that world is nothing but this one where we live, that we do not suspect it to be different from what it should be, and we do not notice anything. Some say that Bobby Aizenberg knew all this, and that you can see it by looking at his drawings.

Translation by Aurora Bernardez of the text for the Roberto Aizenberg exhibition at Il Naviglio Gallery, Milan, 1983. Published in ARTINF, year 8, Nº46-47, June-July 1984. Page 9.

From the text for the Roberto Aizenberg exhibition at Il Naviglio Gallery, Milan, 1983. Published in ARTINF, year 8, Nº46-47, June-July 1984. Page 9.

In the wide range of attitudes adopted by visual artists today, Roberto Aizenberg stands out, not only because he continues to cultivate the pictorial language with singular determination when many abandon it, but also because he does it with respect for very old frames. Without theorizing and without caring about the theories of others, let alone the critical judgment, whoever it may be, as if he were fulfilling an enlightened task.

I believe that, for this reason, it is impossible to place him in the universal panorama of painting, because, despite the thematic and even thematic variations that the public will appreciate over the years, his imagination works less with the unconscious and more with a conscious intellectuality, with a conscious intention aimed at the permanence of the forms he creates.Variations that, on the other hand, only show minimal changes in his world of fantasy and reality.

On the other hand, it is easier to place him in the panorama of national painting, within the line that in some way was initiated by certain portraitists of the last century and is continued in the work of Emilio Pettoruti and José Antonio Fernández Muro, to cite only the creators. a line of expressive hardness that excludes contingency but also necessity and is of good workmanship, as it should be, corresponding to a facet of our character.

Undoubtedly, his excentric attitude establishes the exception that confirms the rule that I strive to make explicit for the exercise of a new language, artistic but not pictorial. Hence the passionate interest that justifies this exhibition. It is part of the fair play that we propose at every moment, anxious not to fall into stereotypes that are no less dangerous than the old ones because they are new, since the danger lies in stereotyping.

Prologue of the catalog of the retrospective exhibition “Aizenberg,”  at the Visual Arts Center of the Torcuato Di Tella Institute, exhibition no. 64, June 3-29, 1969.

“True poetry is metaphysics.” Antonin Artaud.

None of the arts, like painting, has evolved in modern times at such a dizzying pace in search of a language as far away as possible from traditional language. Painting launches itself into the exploration of an immense field of possibilities that extends from the cultivation of pure sensation, the simple visual pleasure, to the diving through the mechanism of the image into the most recondite and ignored depths of the spirit, once the principle of imitation, which seemed to be the impediment to its expansion, has been abandoned.

A modern painting is no longer a fragment extracted from the world of appearances, to which the world of the imagination must submit. However, it should be noted that this submission of the imagination to reality has been almost always quite relative. Very often, it has happened that the artist has tried to place himself in the intermediate zone between the poles of the imaginary and the real, with undoubted approaches to the pole of pure imagination in some great moments of the history of painting.

Painting also seemed to be constrained to its role as static art, capturing a single moment in the passing of beings and things.But here, too, it has wanted and continues to want to abandon statism in order to capture that elusive thing that is succession, that impalpable component of life that we call time, that mysterious instant in which something is and ceases to be simultaneously

It is not unusual that these considerations about the destiny of painting arise when contemplating the work of certain artists who, like Aizenberg, rethink the validity, with a personal approach, of the fundamental principles of plastic expression, or, to put it more clearly, the work of a painter who, like Aizenberg, incorporates in his painting elements that seem to be beyond painting.

In his paintings, he tries to reveal those dreamed or sensed worlds, those worlds covered by a fog that the painter completely tears apart to offer them with the strictest precision, located in the limit zone that corresponds neither to life nor to death but to an obscure aspiration that, for lack of another term, we call immortality.

Aizenberg’s paintings present us with a true coagulation of silence—that sensation of profound silence that also emanates from some of the paintings of De Chirico’s metaphysical period. A strange suspension of all noise that perhaps comes from the timelessness in which the artist places things, or rather, that level of time in which the ancient and the modern are identified. The metaphysical silence of things that have long lived beyond the human and are now reintegrated into man.

After some initial trials, Aizenberg’s work has followed a definite trajectory in which it has been permanently refined. His entire evolution is a clear process of purification, comparable to alchemical purification, in search of the essential gold of painting. In his mechanism, he uses three primordial elements: space, light, and architecture, the latter as a manifestation of the presence of man. The relationship of Aizenberg’s art with alchemy lies not only in the constant search for a formal essence, but also in endowing that formal essence with a deep metaphysical symbology.

This painting presents us with perplexing quandaries: is it not just a dream in the waking state, and is it not the penetration into the only real world in the dream state?

The raising of these questions reveals the link between Aizenberg’s work and surrealism. Indeed, enlightened by surrealist works and ideas, the artist saw the immense field of exploration of the unknown offered by the universe of the psychic, a universe that contains everything: the outer world and the inner world.

Surrealism is nothing more than an incitement to not stop, to penetrate fearlessly into the domain of mystery, which is, as much or more than that of routine daily life, the patrimony of man.

In order to fulfill his mission as a revealer of mysteries, Aizenberg carefully studied the language of his art in order to reach, with his material of signs, drawings, and color, that difficult zone of integral communication that is the aspiration of every artist. Integral communication occurs when what is communicated carries with it a particular affective component that we know by the name of enchantment and which constitutes, in short, the essence of all authentic art. And here it is necessary to emphasize that the phenomenon of enchantment links art with magic, which represents nothing more than the close affective ties that secretly bind everything that exists. What immediately impresses when contemplating Aizenberg’s paintings and drawings is the technical perfection, the impeccable finish. But this perfection does not only represent the artisanal ambition of a man seeking absolute mastery of his art; it is also the formal quality that corresponds exactly to, and best suits, the world that Aizenberg wants to express. In order to achieve this perfection, Aizenberg eliminates everything that is accessory, as well as any trace of doubt, or uncontrolled impulse, in an almost ascetic effort to resort only to the essential. But even if he eliminates all traces related to the immediate vital (which includes error, hesitation, and even clumsiness), his work presents a curious palpitation that, although removed from common life, reflects the surprising vitality of the visionary.

At the beginning of his artistic work, Aizenberg practiced drawing intensely; then, from 1949 to 1954, he painted and drew in search of the images that would constitute the “leitmotif” of his work. In 1954, he paints a picture, “Fire of the Minsk Hasidist College in 1713,” which already reveals the maturity of his style and in which almost all the elements of his future work are found.

In 1959, another significant painting for his evolution can be placed under the title “Europe, my friend.” This painting represents the maximum purification reached by the artist, and initiates a series of paintings of metaphysical abstraction that would culminate in his recent creations.

There is a motif that dominates all of Aizenberg’s work. This motif is represented by almost abstract constructions, of orthogonal or polyhedral conformation, often in the form of a tower, with windows repeated in series and devoid of any ornamentation. These constructions stand illuminated by pure light in a space of total transparency. At other times, the walls are cracked by maculae arranged like the windows in a rigorous serial order. Rarely does he present us with landscapes, and in these cases they are only soberly marked by globular formations also repeated serially. Geometric severity and serial order dominate the structure of the forms. And a space of impressive calm and solitude from which emanates a subtle distressing quality.

In these works, space, a true void, is dominated by a man-made object, the architectural construction, which separates itself from man and confronts him. The work of man appears as a question mark. A questioned that in turn interrogates. Those strange buildings that are neither ancient nor modern and yet participate in both have the age of the imaginary, an age that is not corroded by time. They abandoned man and appear to have lost track of their creator. They stand unusual and enigmatic, true habitats of emptiness, only receptors of the astonishment of the gazes. And to confirm this sense of a work destined to be a receptacle of astonishment, in a series of paintings by Aizenberg, sometimes separated by quite distant periods of time, there appear two characters seen from behind, who look like father and son, and whose only mission seems to be to contemplate. But this is not the only mission of the characters; their enigmatic presence in the atmosphere of solitude in the painting cannot be limited to a single meaning: contemplation. In the first term, they seem to want to affirm human continuity (father and son) even in that deserted universe, and successively many other meanings emerge as one observes these disturbing beings who turn their backs to the spectator.

Aizenberg’s architectures of rigorous geometric structure lead fatally to pure geometric abstraction, which begins to alternate with figurative paintings until it dominates the artist’s recent production. In the latter, paintings with serial geometric forms alternate with others that boast a single form (a circle, square, or polygon). In both cases, the artist manages to produce the strange sensation that the plane disappears and the form floats isolated in the void, as if it were the visualization of some immaterial element.

But both in the paintings of figurative geometry and in the strictly abstract ones, the sense is the same: we are confronted with a metaphysical geometry, that is to say, with a geometry that departs from the known because it ceases to be a material sign to become a spiritual sign. In geometric perfection, Aizenberg seeks the essence of certain supra-human conditions. He transmits to us an archetypal universe in which the geometric is not merely a manifestation of the rational, the bare outline of an idea, or the graphic projection of a number, but is instead clothed in the profound mystery that is the seat and true origin of the archetypes.

The sensation of the unusual that we find in Aizenberg’s paintings has a very particular meaning. The artist does not seek the unusual by the accumulation of dissimilar or incompatible details, but in a more subtle way: the unusual appears as a result of the total climate of the painting, it does not reside in any particular detail, in any distortion of the images, but in the natural forms themselves, in their desolate and very strange perfection, illuminated by a cold light that individualizes the forms to the maximum and depersonalizes them. And it should be added that there is nothing strange in this because, in the face of perfection, we are always invaded by the feeling of being before things from another world, from which we are separated by their haughty and unmovable solitude.

In Aizenberg’s drawings, the mechanism is apparently different. There is no doubt that fantasy is freer, and a new element appears to be dominant: humor. Also, instead of the sober, almost inhuman constructions of his paintings, the subject in the drawings (except in some of the abstract structures) is the human figure itself. But in them the same rigor prevails, the same perfection of forms that tend to the geometric or the organic-geometric, with the presence of the same serial mechanisms that are generally found in clothing. More than human figures, they are robots, strange machines of being men, sometimes deflected, in fragments not yet integrated, or monstrously disproportionate as if composed of parts of different bodies, or decapitated trunks in which the head has been replaced by flames and smoke. All these images—we repeat—are transcribed by means of an impeccable drawing, of an almost mystical perfection. These figures are also depersonalized characters, they are iconic signs, alchemical reductions (a term that must be repeated as it is key in Aizenberg’s art) of the element called man. And in most of them, it is the clothing, with its seductive serial designs, that is essential. One could perhaps speak of man-dress with all the implications that arise from that designation.

What more can be said of a painter who has managed to express so much with an absolute economy of means and only resorting to the specific mechanisms of painting, of a painter who has been able to extract from the painted image the force of communication capable of transmitting to us states that are not describable, that can hardly be suggested by words?

And finally: a comment on the modernity of his painting. Although the work created by Aizenberg seems to be located at the margin of the artistic struggles of the time, few painters seem to us more current, more modern, perhaps precisely because he seeks the timeless, that which is always present in man is always current.

Text for the retrospective exhibition: “Aizenberg”, at the Centro de Artes Visuales del Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, exhibition nº 64, from June 3 to 29, 1969.

De criaturas que aunque nada parecen
tener que ver con animal alguno sobre la
Tierra, con ningún animal que se arrastra
sobre la Tierra, están a su manera
vinculadas a lo humano, concebidas por
Roberto Aizenberg como arquetipos de
una especie todavía secreta.

Como lunares y solares índices,
imágenes de pasos
que la materia viviente da
y reitera yendo sin detenerse
de la luz a la noche,
del rojo al negro,
del blanco al amarillo,
al naranja, la nefasta
mezcla de blanco y negro,
rosa, mezcla
de rojo y banco, rosa,
sabiduría de Dios.

Como ausentes cabezas y troncos,
irreales miembros,
y vértebras
ocultas en el mecanismo, partes
que subordinadas al todo
vaticinan el fin, disolución
de las que nos representan,
venas, una nariz, el sombreado
nacimiento de nuestros cabellos,
las nueve fosas, aberturas, fosos
por donde nuestras cabeza extrae
la mudez y el habla, la visión
y el terrenal zumbido, la vertical
aspiración, hacia el cielo,
y la expiración, para abajo.

Ellas se reproducen
y nosotros pasamos
a la condición de intento frustrado,
de efímero, aberrante fenómeno,
sin más vigencia en el tiempo
que el instante del saurio inmemorial,
pues la naturaleza
no necesita justificarse
cuando porque sí
abandona un proyecto
y empieza otro, como ahora, aquí,
ensaya ese tú y ese yo
del rigor geométrico,
el cubo desbordando
para encarnar lo abierto, femenino,
y el rectángulo en el rectángulo
en el rectángulo en el rectángulo
para la forma cerrada, masculina,
y lo andrógino, antagónico,
en el seno del disco
que se frota en el disco.

Poema inspirado en la obra de Roberto Aizenberg: “Estatua Nº 5” madera policromada, 150 x 31 x 15 cm., 1964, Buenos Aires, colección Museo de Arte Moderno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires.

Publicado en el catálogo del Premio Nacional e Internacional Instituto Torcuato Di Tella 1964.