Persistent forms: connections between inventionist and neo-concrete art

MARÍA AMALIA GARCÍA

Sur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction. The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

Año: 2019; p. 108 - 117

What would happen if, in addition to acknowledging the standard genealogy that traces the origins of Latin American modern art back to its roots in European abstraction, we were to seek other threads that run through this regional history? That is, active linkages, currents, concepts, procedures, and referents that reappear intermittently in the works and the discourses surrounding them and that, properly considered, might allow us to build a history of Constructive art with regional potency. What, then, are the persistent elements that run through the history of the Constructive avant-garde in the Southern Cone? First, the cutout, or irregular, frame. Initially proposed in 1944 by the Uruguayan artist Rhod Rothfuss in an influential essay in Arturo, the idea has a strong affinity with the formal investigations pursued by the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark in her 1954 series Quebra da moldura (Breaking the Frame). Though the two interrogations of painting´s conventional orthogonal frame diverge in certain ways, both formal and conceptual, each capitalizes on the tensions inherent in the fraught line between visual and real space. Second, modern painting´s traditional model of composition within a grid (a central tenet of regional Constructive projects). In this regard, Piet Mondrian's work was of signal importance to the region, where it was widely disseminated in magazines, books, and exhibition catalogues. The circulation of this imagery opened new fields of research around mechanisms of reproduction and their possible readings. Third, the influence of Carnival. In both Inventionist and Neo-Concrete art, various artistic devices were transformed by the artists´ experience of Carnival.The staging of this exhilarating popular celebration draws not only on skill sets related to dance and its costuming, but also on the techniques and materials involved in constructing Carnival paraphernalia. Carnival thus becomes a reference both for the cutout frame of the Inventionists and for the Parangolés later developed by the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica; both of these aesthetic projects were inflected by, if not a direct result of, their proponents´ contact with Carnival´s festive universe.