Ruth Benzacar Art Gallery presents Carlos Huffmann, with a series of paintings and digital compositions that are the result of a search in the field of abstraction and formalism.
The exhibition will take over Room 2 of the gallery and will be accompanied by a text by Javier Villa.
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By Javier Villa
When we humans left modernism behind, our muscle for composition started to atrophy, especially the muscle that comes from experience with a limited set of forms and colors. With a doggedness that, like a river’s or fire’s, is never the same, that muscle aspires to some sort of transcendence. What we might actually have lost is some idea of how to answer the question about what we want to transcend, about where the beyond we want to reach is, and about why, to what end, we want to reach it. Do we, today, want to engage in a gymnastics of forms and colors to reach a meditative or multiversal state in order to slow down and reconnect with some sort of spiritual specter? Or is the idea to transcend current events in a kind of silent uprising? Do we hope to find in a contemplative pax shelter from the bombardment of carrion images? Or is the compositional gymnastics an uneasy emotional, manual, and human calm that runs on a parallel path, a workout that allows the artist to generate a space in which to flesh out a work steeped in entropy, death, technological apocalypses, and posthumanism? We can identify a Carlos Huffmann of the future and a Carlos Huffmann of the past, but is there a Carlos Huffmann of the present?
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The gouaches. They look at times like art produced by AI that has been programmed to make abstract art or like the vector algorithms used to generate that art. Other times, though, they feel like the final orthogonal and purely human crevice of the image. Stubborn insistence on formal composition as if defending a craft in danger of extinction, a defense waged with no utopian pretense, no use for or pertinence to the present and its circumstances, no politically correct or polemic discourse. Return to an aged technology to reconnect with the survivors and, from there, reconstruct, or do so in order to work around the stopped-up transit of the contemporary image and generate a space out of time that once again asks about art: What are we making? For whom and for what are we making it? And, even, how long will we keep making it? Is art—material art—just a quirky and nostalgic niche for the handful of wealthy tourists who will, in the future, move through the physical world? Sometimes these gouaches look like they were made in a bunker for the humans who will make it through the sixth mass extinction. They are there so that those humans can recover the gymnastics of color and form. Sometimes they look like seeds scattered carelessly in hope of regenerating that native forest of form by casting it out like a bottle cast out into the sea. They also look like foliage or stones, like Fontana’s slashes or Oiticica’s metaschemes[JB1] , like intersections without clusters, like the dynamic background of a manga or anime, like the meandering of the mindless drawing we make time and again on the margins of a notebook while we listen to yet another lecture about the end of the world.
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Is it possible to imagine, or even represent, a compositional and conceptual cross between Oiticica’s metaschemes and Fontana’s slashes? In Argentina, unlike in Brazil, the move out toward action, space, and the social started with a cut, not with continuity. Faced with the abyss that Fontana rendered with his attack on matter, along with infomalism’s nerve and material irreverence, concrete art from the Rio de la Plata had, it would seem, just two options: to spin endlessly on its own axis or to break off and head into outer space. Oiticica’s wearable parangolé [JB1] is colorful living and formal [JB2] art thanks not only to the references to Brazil’s favelas, but also to the continuity between concretism and neoconcretism. Thanks to the mutual contagion between Greco’s Vivo-Dito and a still-latent European conceptualism, the Vivo-Dito is not only synthetic and caustic living art, living art to the zero degree, but also an offspring of the cut and reboot that followed Fontana’s slash. If Carlos’s gouaches cross the metaschemes and the tagli, they do so neither to come up with a final product or idea nor to follow the modernist avant-gardes by forging a forward-looking space. Perhaps all they do is provide a possible way into a silent dimension, an emotional algorithm that, with no haste but great receptivity, encourages floating ideas and unanswerable questions.
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While the passage from modern to contemporary art, which occurred in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, took different paths, shortcuts, and bridges in Brazil and in Argentina, both headed in the same direction. The space of Oiticica’s metaschemes led first to his bólides and Grande Núcleo and then to the parangolés and Tropicália[JB1] , an immersive tunnel into the spatiality, colors, and textures of life in Brazil. The slash sundered by Fontana, meanwhile, turned into the gateway that Greco opened up with his Vivo-Ditos, a black hole in art that could suck up reality wholesale, and then into Minujin’s Menesunda, an immersive tunnel into the spatiality and sensorial stimulation part and parcel of contemporary life in Buenos Aires. To break free of the chains of the modern tradition and its orthogonal painting, Latin America penetrated the work, headed inside it, rather than ricochet into its outer space, whether that space is physical—in the case of minimalism—or philosophical and metaphysical—in the case of North American and European conceptualisms. That inward turn by no means meant shelter for the artist’s subjectivity or a work of art destined to isolation. Just the opposite. It was a strategy to physically and emotionally pull people and their reality into the fiction of art and, hence, to imagine, along with society itself, new ways of relating to the world. If Carlos’s gouaches travel in time to the tagli and metaschemes, to the zero degree of that inward abyss, what they ask is what we would find today, or what might lie in the future of art, if we change course and head back into the work.
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It was not until the nineteen-nineties that there was any trace of continuity to the breakage that Fontana and informalism meant for concrete art, as opposed to the extension of that movement in Brazil with neo-concretism. The most revered and masculine avant-garde in the history of Argentine art was appropriated and torn to bits by an energetic LGTB and feminist generation. Inventionism intersected with the decorative, the ambition of a universal language with the reality of a domestic language, the rational with the intimate, the activist struggle for an aesthetic ism with the activist struggle around gender. What endured was the medium-sized object. Along with a cocktail of—among other ingredients—a certain nostalgia for modern abstraction, a certain kitsch decorativism that did not shy away from the pop art of the nineteen-sixties, and an incipient renewal of political engagement that looked to the future more than to the nineteen-seventies, that object nurtured a local contemporary art market. If the nineteen-nineties redid concrete art, the post-2001 generation inherited the genes of Fontana’s virulent attack on matter in what might be an unconscious repetition of history. And that tradition was not deployed to revisit stale patriarchal narratives passed down over the generations. It was, rather, a symptom that reappears—perhaps mostly in certain political contexts. The mission is to assail form and expand its limits, and that is just what Diego Bianchi does in his Daños, or to take to the street to conquer reality and, with a simple gesture, pull it into art, and that is just what Luciana Lamothe does in her actions. The advent of the Internet also rendered a slash in local art history. Fresh information from international art history and immediate access to the ideas and trends of a global contemporary scene and visual culture from anyplace and everyplace in the world were there to be reworked. That heightened the Argentine artist’s identity as one who takes whatever they fancy, without shame or indebtedness—Borges describes it in “The Argentine Writer and Tradition.” Born of that contemporary reality, Carlos’s gouaches are, arguably, more reflexive than hedonistic. They dwell in an odd place, a place that does not suit them, a place anything but clear. They generate a space where contradictions coexist rather than attempt to cancel one another out. Concrete art after the experience of the nineties and the reappearance of Fontana slash’s in the aughts. A need for authentic and universal human composition before the onslaught of the digital future. A need for a highly material and local art history. The moment when form is once again composed. The moment when a slash is wrenched as opening and as breakage. Creating a space of flight and, once again, envisioning forward.
December 2001 witnessed the worst economic and political crisis in modern Argentine history. A bank run was followed by a succession of five presidents over the course of just eleven days.
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