Informalism between Surrealism and Concrete Art. Aldo Pellegrini and the Promotion of Modern Art in Buenos Aires during the 1950s

MARÍA AMALIA GARCÍA

New Geographies of Abstract Art in Postwar Latin America

Routledge

Año: 2019; p. 11 - 24

This essay addresses the relationship between abstraction and Surrealism, which was crystalized in Informalist art of the 1950s through Aldo Pellegrini?s central role. I make a case for an analysis of Surrealist poets such as Aldo Pellegrini (and Julio Llinás) as a catalyst for a reformulation of the artistic panorama and the promotion of international Informalism in the cultural field of Buenos Aires. The freedom of theartist in the art production, the use of extra-artistic materials, and the recovery of chance were key elements that linked Informalism with the Surrealist tradition. In this sense, the poetics of Informalism was understood as a totalizing synthesis of two great traditions of modernity: abstraction, as the negation of mimesis, and Surrealism, as the opening of unconscious and automatic channels of expression. I argue that Pellegrini?s approach to Surrealism and Concrete art exposes both poetics as much more closely linked and permeable than has been considered in the historiography of modern art. Pellegrini suggested new interpretations outside the canon of modern art acting as a great conciliator of those apparently irreconcilable opposites.